


Pulsar

by southspinner



Series: Pulsar [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Multi, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-07-23 15:19:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>/ˈpəlˌsär/ (n.) a celestial object, thought to be a rapidly rotating neutron star, that emits regular pulses of radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation at rates of up to one thousand pulses per second.</p><p>A story about college, coming to terms with your past, being scared of your future, and running into crazy things like love somewhere in-between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nebula

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> neb·u·la  
> /ˈnebyələ/  
>  _(noun)_  
>  a cloud of gas and dust in outer space, visible in the night sky either as an indistinct bright patch or as a dark silhouette against other luminous matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to the trip, kids. i have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> also, tumblr user aloeviera did this incredible [illustration](http://aloeviera.tumblr.com/post/147425396221/look-up-piece-i-did-for-southspinners-new) for this chapter. how #blessed am i?

The world has a long history of great stories. Chaucer to Dickens to Austen to Hemingway to Palahniuk to Rowling and everything in-between, there have always been stories to tell and people to tell them. Stories are what mankind clings to, narratives of other places and times to distract from the darkness at hand, recounts of heroism to lend courage to the fearful, fables to teach the lessons that can’t go unlearned. Anyone can tell a story, but telling a _great_ story is an art form. The exact recipe hasn’t been discovered since the dawn of time, but there are some elements that work consistently. A wise man once said that all great stories begin with alcohol.

But maybe that man was an idiot, because this is not a great story. This is a raging keg party in a fraternity house on a small college campus in semi-rural Pennsylvania, the air thick with the smell of weed and body spray and sour beer. The only things worth talking about happening within these walls are the miracle of how the old wooden floors haven’t given way beneath the weight of too many bodies and the phenomenon of how Keith’s splitting headache keeps finding a way to get _worse._

“Remind me why we’re here again,” he says, raking a hand back through shaggy, dark hair and squinting at the ongoing game of beer pong in the middle of the room.

The tiny form curled up next to him on the sunken-in couch shifts a bit. “What?”

“Remind me why we’re here again.”

_“What?”_

_“Why the hell are we here?”_ Keith’s voice doesn’t do much to make it over the bass thudding out of the stereo system to his right, the hum of the music buzzing in his chest and shooting up between his vertebrae to _hammer_ on the inside of his skull. He screws his eyes shut, prays for patience. No results.

Beside him, Pidge shrugs, bony knees drawn up to their narrow chest as they polish off a red solo cup full of far more liquor than someone who weighs all of ninety-nine pounds should be ingesting. Keith knows better than to worry. It would hardly be the first time they drank him under the table. Their amber eyes are magnified to an almost comical size by big round glasses that take up half of their pixie-featured face, sandy hair a mess of cowlicks that stick out around their ears. A couple of passing partygoers wonder aloud who let the little kid in. Pidge – a very defensive twenty-one years of age – flips them off gracefully before answering Keith’s question, projecting over the music in a reedy alto. “Because, Point A: There’s free booze. Point B: We both need to get out more, and Point C: Hunk invited us and it would be rude to not show.”

Hunk is currently across the room being supported by four of his fraternity brothers in a keg stand that’s been going on for at least thirty seconds and probably wouldn’t notice if they left, but Keith doesn’t mention that, snorting into his drink and pursing his lips around the cup’s plastic edge.

“You’re doing it again,” Pidge sighs, rolling their eyes and grabbing a jello shot or five off of a passing tray.

Keith frowns. “Doing what?”

“Brooding.”

“I do not _brood._ ”

“You’re an English major. Brooding is practically an enrollment prerequisite for you guys.” Smirking, Pidge leans over and drops a plastic ketchup cup full of something that smells like a radioactive strawberry into Keith’s outstretched palm. “Dislodge the stick from your ass. Have a jello shot. Enjoy the remaining days of your wild youth.”

“You’re a textbook nerdy Computer Sciences major, and you don’t see me making sweeping generalizations about it,” Keith grumbles, engaging in an undignified struggle with slurping the shot out of its container. It tastes like someone dropped a Jolly Rancher in a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

“Don’t you stereotype me, you son of a bitch,” Pidge replies, distracted by a Pokémon Go notification that flashes across the screen of their phone. “Ugh, God, this gym battle _sucks._ ”

“You just set yourself up for these things, don’t you?”

“Go to hell, Keith.”

“I’m already there. Which circle of Dante’s Inferno is the Beta Theta house in, do you think?”

Pidge’s mouth is halfway open around some snarky retort when they’re both ambushed by a very large, very drunk, very affectionate mass of frat boy, tree trunk arms wrapping both of them into a lung-crushing hug that hauls them both upright off the couch and squeezes the witty banter right out of them. “What’s _up_ ; you both made it!”

Hunk, who’s about two people tall and three wide, bedecked in a Steelers jersey and _jorts,_ for fuck’s sake, looks like about the last person anyone would expect to be a Civil-Mechanical-Electrical Engineering triple-whammy with a glistening 4.0 GPA and a track record for bursting into tears when the local animal shelter has adoption fairs on the quad. At first glance, he looks like he should be _playing_ for the Steelers instead of just rocking his Polamalu jersey. Keith and Pidge, however, know him for the big King’s Hawaiian Sweet Roll that he is, both of them accepting the inevitable embrace with choked-off greetings.

“How’s it goin’, man?” Keith wheezes, patting him on the back and raking in a grateful gasp of air when Hunk finally lets them go and takes a step back. He’s fairly sure only one or two ribs are bruised.

Hunk beams, clapping him on the shoulder. His bones creak morosely. “Oh, this is a _great_ night, dude. Super cool to see everyone back from break, good vibes all over the place, and Pidge actually got you out of the dorm. Pretty sure that qualifies as a miracle.”

“That’s me, your friendly neighborhood tiny agender Jesus,” Pidge chimes in, deadpanned as they swipe their way through a gym battle on their phone.

Keith scowls at the both of them, swiping another one of Pidge’s gross jello shots and knocking it back with a little more grace this time. “You guys do know that I regularly leave the dorm of my own volition, right?”

“Uh-oh,” says Hunk with a knowing look, “he’s brooding again.”

“I don’t _fucking_ brood!”

“Uh-huh.” Rather than interrupting their battle, Hunk just picks Pidge up and deposits them on the far side of the couch, plopping down beside Keith and kicking his feet up on the coffee table. “So what have you got coming up this semester?”

Keith starts counting off courses on his fingers, already quietly dreading all the papers he’s going to have to write. “20th Century American Lit, couple Creative Writing courses, couple Gen Ed courses… pretty sure it’s Statistics and Physical Science.”

Hunk wrinkles his nose the way he does at everything that isn’t an Engineering class. “Gross.”

“Could be worse,” Keith shrugs, drumming his fingers across his knee. There’s something weird and restless coiling in the back of his head when he thinks about school, a tension that’s winding tight even before he sets foot on campus. “I’m gonna see if they’ll let me up my hours at my work study too. I’m broke.”

“Like you don’t spend enough time in the library as it is,” says Hunk.

Keith doesn’t mean to glower at him as intensely as he does. “I like the library.”

“Nerd,” Pidge says around a fake cough.

“Shut up, Pidge, you’re literally hunting Pokémon at a frat party right now.”

“Broody nerd.”

“Why am I friends with either of you?” Keith sighs, rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers.

“Because it’s cheap entertainment and you love us, even if you won’t admit it,” says Hunk, very matter-of-fact as he grabs a drink from one of his frat brothers with a word of thanks and passes it to Keith. “Here, for you.”

Keith frowns down into the solo cup. Whatever’s in there, it’s an odd grayish-blue color and smells sticky-sweet. “What is this?”

“A trashcan.”

“No one has ever handed Keith a more fitting beverage,” Pidge snickers, missing their final blow in the game and cursing as the local gym’s champion defends their title.

Still not convinced, Keith takes a small sip and raises an eyebrow. “What’s in it?”

“Everything,” Hunk replies, tallying up ingredients in his head before adding, “and Red Bull.”

“I’ve got class in the morning…”

“Keith.” Finally looking up from their phone, Pidge lays a small hand on his shoulder, fixing him with this conspiratorial grin that spells more trouble than Keith really wants to get into tonight. “Remaining days of your wild youth, remember?”

“You enjoy the remaining days of your wild youth,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ll babysit you and make sure you don’t break your neck.”

“Suit yourself,” Pidge shrugs, grabbing the drink out of his hand and raising it towards him. “L’chaim.”

Pidge drinks the better part of three more trashcans, and at some point the laws of chemistry just start meaning more than their freakishly high tolerance. Hunk ends up wandering off back into the midst of the party, and Keith sits there with his merrily tipsy roommate lying across his lap, feeling like a strange sort of anchor as the world spins on around him. People come and go and laugh and shout and empty glasses and fill them again, some sort of odd stop-go motion that doesn’t really register as the passage of time. Pidge starts rambling, Hunk comes back for a few minutes, and the guy on the couch across the room from them watches the whole scene like it’s something worth watching.

Weird.

“Y’know what I want?” Pidge groans, clamping their hands over their stomach. “ _Primanti Brothers,_ man. The original one, down in the Strip District. A massive kielbasa and cheese sandwich from Primanti’s with fries and slaw and tomatoes piled on.”

“We’re not going all the way to Pittsburgh for drunk food,” Keith tells them in a bored monotone, letting his head fall back against the top of the couch. Stop-go. Stop-go. People move into the kitchen and down from upstairs and the bass floods out of the speakers like a leviathan’s heartbeat.

“Oh God, or _Burgatory._ Those _milkshakes,_ dude, do you remember?”

“Yes, Pidge, I remember Burgatory,” he says, a little more snappish than he means to be. “I also remember that it’s an hour and a half away, so you’ll have to make do with roller hotdogs from Wawa.”

Pidge is quiet for a long time, a soft, distant look on their face before they finally whisper, “D’you ever miss home, Keith?”

He doesn’t like that question, because it’s tricky. There’s an ache in his chest when he thinks of Pittsburgh, the narrow streets and the sun shining off the water at North Shore and the fireworks in the sky over downtown after every Pirates baseball game, but he’s not sure if it’s longing or something else. Every one of Keith’s happy memories has always felt like a double-edged sword. For every thought of the shape of skyscrapers on the horizon, there’s a memory of darkness and fear and loneliness, the sound of rush hour traffic mingled with the constant noise in the group home, a cataclysm of golden moments of almost-good times mixed with the acrid smell of car exhaust, the familiar click of his suitcase, off to a new family, and a new family, and a new family.

Pidge has their own story, their own sadness, but whatever they’ve lost, they at least remember it enough to feel it the way they’re supposed to.

Does he miss home?

“No,” he says after a while, unable to balance the statement with the way he still feels like something in him is breaking. “No, not really.”

Missing home implies having a home to miss.

The room has revolved on its axis all throughout their conversation, but it isn’t until now that Keith realizes he isn’t the only still place in the middle of it all. The guy on the other couch is still sitting there, watching him intently, holding his gaze with dark, clever eyes. Keith isn’t sure how he feels about it.

The guy’s definitely a Theta, a certain home-turf swagger present in the air around him that would give him away if the galaxy-patterned snapback and muscle tee with a big green alien’s face across the front didn’t already get the job done, the fashion looking out of place on his tall beanpole of a body. He’s very tan, which contrasts with how white his teeth are when he looks over at Keith and shoots him a crooked smile, dark hair falling down across his forehead.

“Who is that?” he asks after a minute, elbowing Pidge in the ribs.

Pidge, too drunk to be useful, just looks around vaguely with this dumb, airy grin on their face. “Gotta be more specific, kemosabe. Bit crowded in here.”

“Snapback, alien shirt, obnoxious laugh.”

“Who, _Lance_?” They break out into a manic giggle, feet fluttering against the side of the couch as they laugh. “Why?”

“He keeps looking at me,” Keith mutters, giving Pidge a warning look for being too loud and trying to look like he’s not looking. It doesn’t exactly work. Stealth isn’t his forte.

“Probably wondering why you’re brooding at his party.”

“Pidge, I swear to _God_ —“

“Okay, okay, I’ll refrain from the brooding jokes,” they concede, hauling themself up from Keith’s lap and curling up in the corner of the couch. “That’s Lance McClain. He’s a junior; pretty sure he’s in the Astronomy program. He was Hunk’s roommate freshman year, and then they pledged Beta Theta together and both moved into the house.”

Lance McClain catches him looking and smiles again, a ridiculously nice, Abercrombie model type of smile that’s actually kind of annoying in how pretty it is. Keith clears his throat and looks pointedly away. “That all you know about him?”

Pidge snorts. “I mean, I know he’s a _jackass,_ but I say the same about you on a daily basis, so grain of salt there.”

Keith laughs, but it comes out garbled and forced. Pidge, too inebriated to notice, sighs contentedly and leans against his shoulder. Seconds pass and the world keeps turning, but it feels closer and closer now, the class schedule that starts tomorrow running on a lightning-fast loop in his head, the voices and the music knotting together and pressing inward and filling up every available spot in his consciousness and two jello shots and a beer should not be making everything spin. There’s an unbearable sensation of everything spiraling down on him, a moment of panic where he’s acutely aware of every hammering heartbeat against his ribs.

There’s a poetic sort of tragedy in all of this that he’s not with it enough to point out, something about how he’s spent his whole life moving from place to place because _this_ happens every time he thinks he deserves the luxury of stillness.

It’s a tricky thing, being alone in a crowded room. Keith’s got it down to a science. Alone doesn’t look good on him, never has – opens up space for a lot of ugly shit that he’s usually pretty good at holding down to come out and turn on him – and he’s not quite sure if it’s vanity or the last remnants of his battered survival instincts that pull him to his feet.

“I’ve got to get some air,” he chokes out, turning back to Pidge and trying to will the color back into his face. “You gonna be okay for a minute?”

Pidge fixes him with a concerned frown, but Keith waves them off and they don’t protest, leaning back into their corner of the couch and holding up their drink in one hand and their phone in the other. “I’ve got my couch. I’ve got my trashcan. I’ve got my Pokémon. I’ll manage the devastating separation as best I can.”

Moments and heartbeats and the world pressing down, and Keith doesn’t have to be given permission to get the hell out twice. It’s well past midnight and the party’s still raging, the crush of bodies crammed into the living room almost impassable as he works his way through the kitchen and out the back door. The Theta house has a big back porch overlooking a sprawling back yard. It’s quiet, the clear January night too cold for the partygoers to want to be out in it.

The cold’s sharp and merciless, cutting through the worn leather of his jacket and the thin tee shirt under it, making every breath feel like knives scraping down his throat, but it brings him back, grounds him until the clouds of vapor blooming from his lips in ragged exhalations become more even. The moon’s bright, bouncing in crystalline sparkles off the undisturbed blanket of snow over the yard. It’s beautiful.

Alone is easier to handle when there aren’t people around to underscore it.

The rushing in his head calms down until he can pinpoint certain things in the mess – the loneliness, the rejection letters from six publishers shoved in the back of his desk drawer, the email from Business and Financial Aid with a big scary red PAST DUE at the top that’s the reason he hasn’t looked at his phone all night. It’s a familiar process. Keith picks up everything from the muddle, compartmentalizes it, puts it nice and neat into little boxes and shoves it as far into the back of his head as he can. The days will pass, another night like this will come when everything gets dumped out into a chaotic disaster, and he’ll do it all again. There’s no learning from his own history that he hasn’t already done. Being doomed to repeat it is pretty much all he gets.

Behind him, the back door opens and shuts with a sharp _bang_ that cuts through the winter air like a gunshot. “You all right, dude?”

Lance McClain is walking impressively straight for someone who’s hit as many beer bongs as Keith has watched him partake in this evening. He’s shielded from the cold by a Beta Theta hoodie zipped up over his tacky alien shirt, although he’s still shivering. Keith, a born and bred Pennsylvanian who regards five feet of snow as a minor annoyance, bites back a snarky comment about how natural selection is coming for him.

“Fine,” he mutters, raking a hand back through his hair and turning it into even more of a mess than it was to begin with. Lance gives him this skeptical look that kind of pisses Keith off because a guy he doesn’t even know has no right to see through his bullshit, his sharp features contorting into an expression of concern, and that’s annoying too. He almost chokes on his reply in a failed effort to make it sound normal. “Just… loud and crowded, needed a break.”

Lance nods slowly, walking over to stand beside him and perching his elbows on the porch railing. “Yeah, I feel that. Just figured I’d check on you, bro.”

“I’m not brooding,” Keith says, so sudden that he’s not aware of speaking until it’s too late.

Lance, who’s been looking up at the place where the tree line meets the sky, turns over to him and blinks. “Say again?”

“I… I’m not… I’m not trying to be edgy and sulk at your party or anything, okay?” Keith’s thankful for the dark and the fact that he’s standing in the shadow of the porch light, hoping that it’s enough to hide the heat that rushes to his cheeks as he stares down over the railing at the snow-covered shrubs planted there. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind right now.”

And it’s stupid, really, that he feels such a pressing need to explain that. Maybe it was Pidge and their jokes about it, or maybe it’s just the fact that it’s so rare for someone who _isn’t_ Pidge to give enough of a damn to check on him and there’s something tight in his chest that makes him feel half-guilty for it, like an almost-burden for publicly giving into his own weaknesses. Whatever it is, none of it’s altogether pleasant.

“Huh,” says Lance, like that one syllable’s the answer to everything. He rocks back on his heels, star-patterned Vans squeaking on the worn wood of the porch as he nudges Keith’s arm and points above them. “Well, in that case, pro tip: look up.”

Now it’s Keith’s turn to stand there and blink. “What?”

“Look up. Nice night, right?”

“I… guess?” The sky is crystal clear, stars shining out in the velveteen darkness and a full moon painting soft light down over the snow. The lights of campus are all behind them, and the view ahead is nothing but snow and forest and endless sky, constellations of diamonds stretching out into oblivion.

It’s impossible to see the stars in Pittsburgh. Too much light and smog. But the skies out in rural Pennsylvania are vast and gorgeous and, honestly, something that Keith really hasn’t taken the time to notice until now. Looking up has never been something that came as naturally to him as looking down.

It’s a nice night, though. He’ll give the King of the Frat Boys that much.

Sporting that toothy, crooked smile again, Lance hops up to sit on the railing, leaning his head all the way back to stare upwards. His arm stretches up over his head, one bony finger extended to trace the lines of constellations. “So, wild fact. Up there, right now, thousands of light years away, there are nebulae that are knitting together atoms of matter that have existed since the beginning of the universe and making them into brand new stars, which will burn and grow and die and then their atoms will become more nebulae that make more stars, and on and on and on.”

Keith blinks again. Okay, so the guy’s clearly high as a Georgia pine. This is fine. “Okay?”

Lance laughs, the sound of it clear and melodic, like bells. Hopping down off the railing, he looks over at Keith and shrugs, shoving his hands in his hoodie pockets. “My point is, whatever you’re worried about, it seems a little smaller now, doesn’t it?”

“Not really,” says Keith. Stars are pretty, but they can’t pay off his tuition.

“No? It always helps me out. Worth a shot I guess,” Lance shrugs, and then he just sort of… looks at him. There’s a long moment where there’s nothing but cold and quiet and the clouds of their breaths floating up above their heads.

And then there’s a crash and a chorus of yelling from inside.

“Ah, shit, I think my little just broke the coffee table,” Lance sighs, peeking in through the kitchen window and shaking his head as he heads back for the door. “I’m gonna bounce; have a good night, man.”

“Yeah, you too,” Keith mutters, dazed for reasons he can’t define.

Behind him, the party goes on, the music blasts, people laugh and talk and yell, and for a moment, the clamor in his head starts again, suffocating and chaotic.

But then he looks up, mapping out the black spaces between stars and thinking about how there are forces at work knitting something as old as time itself together, and after a few seconds, he breathes a little easier.

And that’s… something.


	2. Alphard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alphard (α Hya, α Hydrae, Alpha Hydrae) is the brightest star in the constellation Hydra. The name Alphard is from the Arabic الفرد (al-fard), "the solitary one", there being no other bright stars near it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This wasn't the case with last chapter, and it won't always be the case with future chapters, but I'm going to be doing some split POV between Keith and Lance with this fic. I'm trying to mark my switches cleanly with break lines, but if you get confused, let me know, and I'll find a better way to mark the switches in the future!
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

From what Keith’s heard, miracles happen all the time. People survive natural disasters and lift cars and land a five-minute spot on the local news and the world spins on regardless of someone or something purportedly defying the laws of fate. He’s never had some ray of divine providence shine down on his own life, never seen the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast or walked out of a demolished building without a scratch on him, but he supposes it could happen.

As it is now, the closest thing he gets to a miracle is seeing Pidge Holt with their eyes open before noon.

“Wha’timezit?” They groan, squinting through the gray light of almost-sunrise filtering in through the blinds and their own fluffy bed-hair in their eyes as Keith walks out of the bathroom they share with their suitemates next door.

“Seven o’clock,” Keith answers, leaning over his desk to flip open his school-issued laptop. “Go back to sleep.”

Pidge blinks at him blearily, brain too sleepy to process what he just said in a timely manner. “S’Monday. You don’t have 8AM’s on Mondays.”

“I’m opening the library.”

The laptop’s on its last leg, fan whirring in a tired whine of protest and mouse lagging as Keith logs into his student account and pulls up his email. Three new messages from the business office. Big scary red “PAST DUE” at the top. Something that feels like a ball of lead sinks in his gut. _Keep breathing,_ he tells himself; _keep breathing, that’s all you can do._

“Whazzat?” Pidge yawns, pawing around on their desk for their glasses and cursing when they sit up only to bang their head off of Keith’s top bunk.

Keith slams the computer shut, his eyes narrowing as he looks over his shoulder and snaps, “ _Nothing,_ Pidge, now take your hungover ass back to bed.”

And _that’s_ enough to wake them up. Pidge is all of five-foot-nothing and would probably blow away in a stiff enough gust of wind, but there’s this _look_ they get when they’re pissed, a flash of steel in their eyes that sends an immediate _run, bitch, run_ into the psyche of any human with even the basest survival instincts. Keith starts throwing stuff into his backpack like someone’s standing over him with a stopwatch.

“ _I’m_ not hungover, and _you’re_ being a dick,” says Pidge, sounding strangely more concerned than angry as they swing their feet over the edge of the bed and get to their feet. Shivering, they reach down and grab an oversized Altea University hoodie off the floor and tug it on over the tank top they slept in before taking a few steps across the room, looking up at Keith with their hands on their hips. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” he says, shaking his head and swinging his backpack over his shoulder. “I need to go.”

Pidge almost lets him get out the door. Almost. Keith can almost feel the indecision rolling off of them from behind him as he goes to head out into the hallway, a quick upward slope that hovers at the top and tips and closes in the form of a small hand wrapped around his wrist. As pissed as Pidge had been a minute ago, they just look _hurt_ now, eyes big behind their glasses and brow furrowed into a worried frown. “You can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?” Keith’s a firm believer in the method of playing dumb as the ultimate last resort, but it doesn’t quite work when the other person in the conversation is arguably the smartest human ever and knows him about as well as he knows himself.

“What you’ve been doing since the end of last semester. Pushing me out. Trying to pull this tortured anti-hero thing.” And that’s the other thing that Pidge does that makes him want to run out the door and go crawl into the nearest hole, that thing where they pull absolutely zero punches and cut straight through his bullshit and yank the truth of the situation kicking and screaming into the light of day. Along with all the other complicated mess in his head, there’s now hot, bubbling shame searing in his chest. If Pidge sees it, they at least have the mercy to not say anything about it, hand curling into a loose grip on the sleeve of Keith’s jacket as they roll their lower lip up between their teeth, debating on saying something else. When they do, it comes out soft, an earnest plea. “You and me? We’re all we’ve got, Keith. I want to help.”

It is _way_ too goddamned early for him to want to take off running in one direction and never stop again.

He swallows hard, closes his eyes and reasons that lying to Pidge is a fool’s errand even if he’s not ready for the truth to take shape outside his own head yet. “You can’t help.”

“No, I can’t. Not if you won’t talk to me,” they agree with him, this wounded look on their face that makes Keith feel knee-high-to-a-fucking-grasshopper levels of small. The guilt and shame in his chest gives a painful twist, makes him feel like he’s drowning. Nothing new there.

 _Keep breathing,_ he tells himself; _keep breathing._

“Pidge, I…”

 _I’m sorry,_ he wants to say, _I’m sorry for all the shit we’ve had to go through and I’m sorry I’m such a wreck and a bad roommate and a worse friend, I’m sorry we worked so hard to get to where we are and I’ve screwed it all up._

Instead, he tries to swallow the unspoken words in his throat and chokes out, “I’ve gotta get to the library.”

Pidge lets go of his sleeve and takes a step back, lips pursed. Whatever they’re thinking of saying, they must think better of it this time, abandoning it in favor of a resigned sigh and, “Don’t forget your uniform; you’ve got ROTC.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Keith tries to hide the dead, dull edge to his voice, tries even harder to hide the way his hands shake on the closet door. His uniform is hanging on the far side, neatly pressed. His fingertips brush the achievement ribbons pinned to the starched olive-green jacket. Something twists violently in his stomach.

He snatches the hanger out of his closet and turns for the door before his face can betray anything else, taking a step out into the hallway with _keep breathing, keep breathing, keep breathing_ on repeat in his head to block out everything else.

“Keith,” Pidge says before he leaves.

“Yeah?”

“When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.”

He wants to say, _I’m sorry._ Instead, he lets the door of their dorm room swing shut behind him and whispers, “Okay.”

The weather outside is miserable, gusts of freezing wind that cut through Keith’s jacket down to his bones. Within ten seconds of walking out of the dorm, his hands and face are numb, and each breath feels like a frigid knife plunged into his lungs. It’s too early for campus maintenance to have all of the walkways shoveled, so by the time he’s halfway across the quad his Chucks are soaking wet and unbearably cold, and altogether the experience is so unpleasant that the only thing keeping him from turning tail and running back to the relative comfort of his creaky dorm room mattress is the fact that the warmth of the library is closer.

A large red-brick building situated at the end of the quad, the library’s walls act as a buffer to the wind once Keith is close enough to take shelter there, stomping the snow off his shoes and clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering. If he didn’t already feel like a wet rat, comparing himself to the statuesque young woman standing in front of the doors would probably do the trick. She looks more like she just walked out of a Vogue spread than slogged through a slushy parking lot, a pale pink pea coat that contrasts her dark skin buttoned up over skinny jeans tucked into knee-high leather boots, hair a voluminous dyed-silver cloud of curls that falls down around her shoulders. No one’s got the right to look that put-together at seven in the morning.

“Morning, Keith!” she says, smiling, the bright soprano of her voice colored with a posh English accent. She’s got on a little pink polar fleece headband that covers her ears from the cold and matches her jacket perfectly. Keith is suddenly hyperaware of his ratty flannel shirt and beat-up, snow-soaked Chucks.

“How is it that I’m the one who works here and you somehow always beat me to the door?” he grumbles, fishing his keys out of his pocket and letting out a relieved little sound when warm air rushes out the library’s open doors.

“Compulsive punctuality. It’s a Brit thing.”

“It’s a you thing.”

“Point taken,” she laughs, stepping inside and holding out a cardboard drink carrier and a brown paper bag in her mitten-clad hands. “Grande white chocolate mocha and a vanilla bean scone. You didn’t text me, so I got you your usual.”

“You’re a saint, Allura,” he sighs gratefully. He’s got the scone crammed halfway down his throat before the guilt catches up with him, turning back to her with chipmunked cheeks turning red and a vague mumble around his mouthful of baked goods. “I, uh… I might have to wait until my paycheck rolls in to get you back. Money’s kinda tight; if I’d known you were making a Starbucks run I would’ve told you not to get me anything.”

“This one’s on me,” Allura shrugs, nibbling on a muffin far more delicately than Keith is treating his own breakfast. The whole haute couture model aesthetic and her young-looking face make it kind of easy to forget that she’s a thirty-year-old PhD student, but then there are the times when she goes into Mom Mode and makes you remember, like now, when she drops her briefcase down on the front desk and turns over to Keith with an anxious little frown. “You all right, love? You look peaky.”

The truth becomes a hard-to-swallow lump in his throat again, but he shakes his head, straightens his spine and plays it off. “No sleep. Had some pretty bad pre-semester jitters that my roommate thought could be cured by dragging me to a frat party.”

Allura cringes, peeling off her mittens and coat while fixing him with a sympathetic look. “Oh God. Phi Delta?”

“Beta Theta.”

_“Yikes.”_

“Tell me about it.” He laughs, but it comes out soft and more tired than he means it to as he drops his coffee, backpack, and uniform behind the desk, scratching at the back of his head. “I took a shower and I think I still smell like beer and testosterone.”

Allura smirks around the last sip of coffee in her cup. “You know, I’m sort of sad I missed it. I’d like to see you party.”

“I don’t party.”

“Fair enough,” she shrugs, tossing the empty cup in the trash and ruffling Keith’s hair as she passes. “Good for you. I went a little crazy during my undergrad. Not the best idea.”

“I’m sure the Facebook pictures will show up someday when you’re running for office,” he replies dryly, scowling as he tries to get his hair back into its normal style.

“It’s my God-given right as a free citizen to let people do shots of tequila out of my bellybutton if I please; let them judge me,” Allura calls from behind a bookshelf, ambling back through the Reference section. Keith goes to follow her, but stops in his tracks, rooted to the ground as soon as he turns the corner.

The main study area is a _disaster._ There are open books on the tables, half-empty chip bags on the floor, Starbucks cups everywhere, and a Subway sandwich that looks like it’s developed its own system of government over the month-long break inhabiting one of the computer desks. For a split second, Keith can very vividly see himself as that guy from _Planet of the Apes_ who looks up to see the Statue of Liberty in ruins above him at the end of the movie, only he’s a tired, exasperated college kid looking at the monumental mess of other tired, exasperated college kids.

He’s still kind of feeling like slamming his fist into something and screaming ‘Damn you all to hell,’ though, so the comparison works.

“Ugh, _really?_ ” he groans, picking up a cardboard cup of molded coffee between his thumb and forefinger. “Who closed up before break? If the rest of the place looks like this Coran’s gonna lose it.”

Allura pokes her head out from behind another shelf and blinks as she takes in the carnage. “Oh, wow.”

“Food taken past the lobby, books re-shelved out of order, _dog-eared pages_ …“ If possible, his sense of disgust deepens. There’s a special circle in Hell reserved for book abusers. “Barbarians. It’s gonna take half my shift just to clean this up.”

Allura takes a bite of her muffin and starts to slowly back away. “Well, I just need a copy of The Federalist Papers _,_ so I’ll be over here out of your way…”

“Allura, I love you, but keep that muffin the hell out of my stacks.”

She flips him off with a loving smile and disappears into the labyrinth of shelves, pastry in hand.

“I really would stay and help you clean up, but I need to dash,” she says a few minutes later as Keith’s internally debating on the best way to deal with the possibly sentient sandwich, stuffing a sheaf of papers into her briefcase and putting on her coat. “Friend of mine’s starting his master’s today and they threw him right into a TA position. Got to make sure he’s not pulling his hair out.”

Keith’s too busy trying not to gag as he pokes the sandwich into the trash with a pencil to formulate an intelligent response. It takes Allura standing there staring at him for a minute before he realizes he’s supposed to say something, his overworked, under-slept brain whirring like the fan in his dying laptop to come up with something coherent. “Huh? Oh, yeah, that sounds rough. See you around.”

The world goes back into that fuzzy stop-go that happened at the frat party. He’s cleaning up trash one moment and then the next, he’s standing behind the front desk looking at his ROTC uniform draped over the chair, stomach churning, no memory of the space between those two points. Seconds pass, or minutes, or hours, or—

“Keith?”

Allura’s still standing there, watching him, concerned. Like Pidge. Everyone is so _concerned_ and all he wants is a moment to break in peace and privacy without feeling like he’s living in a fishbowl _._

“Hm?” He doesn’t have the energy for a better response. The English department’s pride and joy is reduced to monosyllabic conversation. How the mighty fall.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, mechanical, robotic. Wind him up, let him go, and he can fool the world. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Allura leaves, cold air blowing into the library in her wake. Keith shoves his uniform into a drawer and tells himself to keep breathing. This is life now, complicated and messy and one heartbreak after another. He could flip open a dictionary and turn to _simplicity_ and not be able to understand it, but the one small comfort he gets is that outside his own personal sphere of losing his goddamn mind, it still exists. _Simplicity_ is still on that page in the dictionary. It’s still out there in other peoples’ lives.

He breathes. In. Out. Tells himself that maybe if he looks hard enough, one day he’ll find it.

* * *

“Up.”

“Fuck off.”

“ _Up,_ Lance. You’ve got class in an hour.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“You gotta, now _up_.”

Lance cracks one eye open and immediately wishes he hadn’t. Consciousness gives way to a _splitting_ headache, the light pouring in through his window feeling like it’s attacking him personally, but not quite as personally as Hunk’s formidable silhouette hovering over his bed and leaning down to poke him in the ribs. He knows from experience that he’s got about five seconds before he’s lifted bodily out of his bed and dropped onto the floor, so he decides to preserve his dignity and sit up, groaning and digging the heels of his palms into his screwed-shut eyes. “Ugh, my head.”

He remembers the days when he didn’t even _get_ hangovers. He’s been the legal drinking age for about six months and he’s _already_ too old for this shit.

When he finally stomps the headache down enough to fully open his eyes, Hunk’s giving him this unfairly judgmental look, tossing a cold plastic bottle and two little white pills down into his lap. “Gatorade and Tylenol.”

“Thanks, Mom.” Lance dry-swallows the pills and chases them with roughly half the bottle of Gatorade, praying for the electrolytes to have mercy on him. There’s an ache in his stomach that he’s pretty sure is the agonized cry of his liver. He can feel his heartbeat in his skull. Everything is too bright and too loud.

He’s not quite sure what it feels like to have recently crawled out of Satan’s asshole, but this must be pretty close.

“When did you even get to bed last night?” Hunk asks, arms crossed over his chest.

Lance hauls himself up out of bed and lumbers around his room pathetically, groping half-blind for clothes that aren’t the Avengers boxers he’s currently sporting. Hunk looks like he’s having fun witnessing his pain. Bastard. “Two? Three? I don’t know, man, it’s kind of a blur.”

“Please tell me you didn’t get blackout drunk and make bad decisions without me there to prevent it or at least get it on video.”

“Nah.” He shakes his head, scooping a tee shirt with a flying saucer and ‘I want to believe’ in script across the front off the floor and giving it a quick sniff test. No one’s got time to give a shit at ten in the morning. It gets chucked down on his bed along with a pair of jeans and two vaguely matching socks before he turns back to Hunk with a shit-eating grin. “I met a very pretty boy out on the porch, but I kept myself on a tight leash, don’t worry.”

“Proud of you.”

“Although maybe I should have reconsidered. Celibacy doesn’t look good on me. I’m like a shark, bro; if I stop moving I die.”

If Hunk rolled his eyes any harder, he’d probably be looking at the inside of his own head. “Just get ready.”

The shower helps. It doesn’t get him up to a hundred percent, but washing the beer-and-weed frat party funk off of his body helps him feel a little bit less like a steaming pile of shit, and it’s life’s little victories that really matter. The headache’s still there, though, not helped by five incessant minutes of Hunk pounding on the bathroom door yelling about _why do you need to do your hair when you’re gonna put that stupid hat on anyway, c’mon, you’re gonna be late._ After exiting the bathroom, Lance puts on his galaxy snapback with an extra flourish just to piss him off.

The world outside the front door of the Beta Theta house is a _shitshow._

It’s negative seven thousand degrees and snowing sideways and windy, and not for the first time Lance feels a longing pull in his chest for the sticky summers of Miami, the sun on his shoulders and the light reflecting off the ocean and the old guy that pushed the piragua cart down his street every day. He misses home, misses his mom’s cooking and his sister’s laugh. But mostly, right now, he misses warmth. January in Pennsylvania has almost made him forget it ever existed at all.

“This is some bullshit,” he grumbles, yanking the hood of his Theta sweatshirt up over his head and cinching the strings until only his eyes and nose are visible, the rest of his complaints muffled. “My Cuban ass is not genetically wired to withstand this frozen hellscape.”

Hunk, who’s in jeans and a worn old thermal shirt with _no jacket, what the hell_ shrugs and says, “I’m from Honolulu and you don’t hear me complaining.”

“You’ve got extra insulation!”

“Or maybe you’re just a whiny pain in the ass.”

Lance, his face still cocooned in his hood, places a hand over his heart and murmurs, “You wound me, bro. You cut me deep.”

Hunk rolls his eyes again. “I’m sure you’ll live.”

The quad’s a slushy mess of foot traffic by the time they get there, kids running back and forth between buildings and dorms or headed to the dining hall for lunch. Lance grumbles under his breath and tries to sidestep all the muddy spots in hopes of saving his Vans, but it doesn’t do much and he’s cold and damp from the ankles down after about a minute. Hunk, who for some reason always dresses like he’s either going to a football game or building a house, stomps right through the mess with impunity in the form of his clunky boots, yelling for Lance to hurry up.

“I’m taking a nap in the planetarium after Astro today and no one’s stopping me,” he gripes, finally yanking his hood down and pulling a disgusted face at the way his breath clouds in front of his lips. He’s about ninety-two percent sure that temperatures below freezing are God’s way of punishing the sins of mankind. “We’ve gotta get the guys to cut it out with the Sunday night parties or I’m gonna flunk out – hey, that’s him!”

Hunk stops short in front of him, making Lance run into his back and almost end up on his ass in the snow, which would _really_ set his day off on the wrong foot. “That’s who?”

Lance goes to point, and Hunk smacks his hand down with a hissed chastisement about being rude, so he settles for descriptors instead. “My boy, my porch boy, pretty porch boy, that’s him!”

Said pretty porch boy is standing next to the front door of the library, zipping up his backpack. He’s actually _pretty,_ too, not just pretty in the dark or drunk-at-a-party pretty, shaggy black hair falling in his face and brushing his high cheekbones. Even from across the quad, his features are defined, a sharp jawline and dark, angular eyes narrowed in concentration as he shoulders his bag and heads out from the library. The way he’s built is interesting, too, small but sturdy, a delicate frame with substance, someone who should be slight but ended up strong instead.

Hunk sort of ends his gawking on a sour note by turning around and looking at him like he’s just shot someone. “Who… _Keith?_ You flirted with _Keith?_ ”

Oh yeah, that’s right, pretty porch boy’s your friend. Can you put in a good word for me or—“

“Lance, _no._ ”

Lance groans and yanks his hat off long enough to rake his fingers back through his hair, pinching the bridge of his nose with his other hand. “Look, I know you’re all about this whole ‘Lance needs to work on himself before he goes off chasing tail for the umpteenth time’ thing but I am _dying,_ man, think of sitting at my funeral and knowing that you could have stopped my demise, think of—“

“Okay, number one, no one ever died of celibacy,” Hunk says, interrupting his monologue.

“Speak for yourself,” Lance grumbles, mutinous.

“Number two, you _do_ need to work on yourself. We’ve talked about this.”

“Yeah, thanks for the psychoanalysis, Dr. Phil. Good to know I got the bundle deal on my best friend and my shrink.”

To Hunk’s credit, the fact that he’s made it through two and a half years of friendship with Lance and hasn’t slapped the shit out of him yet is a feat in itself, but right now he’s looking like something’s tap-dancing on the last fraying strand of his patience, shooting Lance an absolutely _withering_ look before he continues. “And number three, don’t try anything with Keith, okay? That’s a whole can of worms you don’t wanna open.”

Lance raises an eyebrow, looking back and forth between Hunk and pretty porch boy’s – his name is Keith, apparently – retreating back. “Wow, that bad?”

“He’s not a bad guy. He’s a really awesome guy, actually, and very gay, which would be beneficial, and now that I think about it you two would be kind of adorable, but… no, no, stop it, shut up, no more matchmaking.” Hunk forcibly derails his own train of thought, smacking himself in the forehead and grabbing Lance’s shoulder so he can’t run off. “Look, at any rate, Keith’s another one of those ‘needs to work on himself’ cases, okay, so the two of you should give each other a wide berth, at least until you’re both in better places mentally. I’m saying this as someone who’s friends with both of you.”

Lance shakes his head and sighs, “Hunk, my dude, I’m starting to think that if you had your way, everyone would work on themselves and no one would ever get laid again.”

“My life would be a hell of a lot simpler if that was the case,” says Hunk.

“I still don’t see what the big deal is.”

“Keith’s… fragile, okay?” Hunk starts, trying to state the matter politely but giving up about halfway through. “He’s a cool guy, but he’s got more baggage than a fucking airport terminal.”

“So you’re telling me to not pursue anything,” says Lance.

“No, because telling you not to do something is the best way to ensure that you do it. I’m telling you to proceed with caution,” Hunk replies. He looks exhausted and he hasn’t even been to his first class yet. Lance tries to make himself feel better by calling up the old reassurance that Hunk knew the levels of bullshit he was signing up for in this friendship. It only about half-works.

Lance knows how he is. He’s fully aware of what a pain in the ass he can be, and even though he’ll never admit it to Hunk, he knows that there’s a kernel of truth in the whole needing to work on himself thing. He knows that he’s got a train of miserably failed relationships a mile long behind him, hitched together with self-worth issues and the fact that he always pushes things too far too fast, dives headfirst into the shallow end every time and cracks his head nine times out of ten. He knows.

He looks at the back of Keith’s jacket disappearing into the Arts and Humanities building, and he knows. And in one of a few very rare occasions in his life, he takes that knowledge and decides to do something smart with it.

“Look, if it’ll ease your mind, I’ll pass on pretty porch boy until the next one comes along,” He says, his tone placating as he takes a few steps backwards up the quad, calling after Hunk, who’s ducking into one of the science buildings. “It’s not like I’m that likely to see him again, anyway.”

For once in his life, he resolves to notice the feeling in his gut, to acknowledge the impulse, and then walk away from it.

Chance meetings are just that. It’s not like it’ll happen again.

* * *

Keith can’t tell what annoys him more, the fact that he sees Lance McClain _everywhere_ over the next few weeks, or the fact that he notices it. He’s got bigger fish to fry. Every other day he gets another scary email from the business office and Pidge is getting harder to convince that he’s fine, he can barely pick up the shifts at the library he needs to pay for books and his phone bill, much less save any money, and he’s pretty sure his laptop might spontaneously combust any time he opens it.

And then there’s Lance McClain. _Everywhere._ And he can’t _not_ notice it.

Altea’s a relatively small university compared to Pitt or Penn State, something to the tune of seven thousand students, most of whom are local commuters while the rest live in the dorms or the frat houses or the cheap, shitty apartments right off campus. The point being, it’s not uncommon to see the same face twice. But as January wears on, Keith starts seeing the same face _all the time._ It starts slow. Even though Keith’s overworked English major ass has no business or desire to be in the science buildings, he passes Lance McClain on his way to class sometimes. And then he’ll see him in the dining hall. And the student union. And snagging a private study room in the library, probably to use the school Wi-Fi to torrent Game of Thrones or something.

He’s just… everywhere. And it’s ridiculous, really, that his stupid brain won’t stop waxing poetic about what a walking contradiction a guy he’s never even talked to in-depth manages to be, stretched across one of the study lounge’s big comfy couches in basketball shorts and god-awful knee socks with skate shoes, his galaxy-patterned-snapback-clad head buried in Stephen Hawking’s latest publication.

It’s even more ridiculous that sometimes he’ll look up from his book as Keith passes, and he’ll smile, that same crooked grin from the night of the party. It’s nothing short of  _asinine_  that Keith lets those smiles make him trip over his own feet before he hurries off to the library with warm cheeks and his heart beating in his ears.

And for _weeks,_ that’s how it goes. They don’t talk. Keith still feels like he’s walking through neck-deep water just making it through the day, the emails keep coming, and his problems steadfastly refuse to evaporate despite the valiant effort he’s making to ignore them. And they don’t talk. Just a glance and a smile here and there, stolen passing moments that Keith should be doing anything but noticing.

But he does notice. He notices, and it drives him further up the wall than he already was.

Pidge and Hunk catch him noticing in the middle of the dining hall one Monday evening, the sky outside already slipping towards darkness at four o’clock when they all sit down with their sub-par cafeteria food. Hunk’s talking about the robotics team the Engineering department is going to sponsor for the local middle school, Pidge is pinching a limp fry between their fingers and whining about the fact that there’s not a Primanti Brothers’ near campus, and Keith is staring shamelessly over the top of _The Color Purple_ at Lance McClain a few yards away. He keeps looking up every few moments to shoot Keith a crooked smile that feels so impossibly familiar by now, and he should _not_ be noticing this.

“You know that the world’s not going to implode if you like… talk to him, right?” Hunk tells him around a mouthful of chicken fajitas, sounding almost defeated as he catches Keith in the middle of his dumbstruck staring and follows his line of sight over to a bunch of Thetas huddled together at the only big table in the place that doesn’t wobble. Lance sits in the middle of everyone’s attention like it’s where he was born to be, laughing at something, a bright tenor that cuts over the rabble like a song. It’s obnoxious, and loud, and melodic in a way that makes you want to stop and listen despite how you tell yourself you feel.

Keith thinks that he might need to stop thinking about people in prose right before he chokes on his burger.

“I… you… Why would I want to give King Fuckboy over there the time of day?” he wheezes, slamming a fist into his own chest in attempts to dislodge the food stuck in his windpipe.

“Beats me.” Hunk shrugs, stealing one of Keith’s fries and flipping a page in his Engineering textbook. “He’s a massive nerd and a general pain in the neck, but I’m just getting kind of tired of you watching him like the sun shines out of his ass or something.”

“I do not!” Keith starts to protest, but Hunk and Pidge look up across the table at him and fix him with stereo deadpanned expressions that cow him into guilty silence.

Hunk shuts his book with a sigh, shaking his head in mock disappointment. “I guess if you want something done… hey, Lance!”

Keith has some trouble reconciling the part of him that’s fighting a valiant battle against shitting his pants with the part that’s dreaming up a thousand painful ways to kill Hunk, so much so that he’s still working through the short-circuits in his head by the time Lance McClain is lounging in the chair next to him, sharp features and a feline smile and a gray tee shirt with the NASA logo on it clinging loosely to bony shoulders and oh God. Oh God.

“Hey, what’s up?” says Lance.

“Hnnnnnnargh,” says Keith.

“Lance, you remember Keith, right?” Hunk asks, stomping hard on Keith’s foot under the table. The pain makes him pick his jaw up off the floor, but it doesn’t do much to distract him from the alarm bells shrieking in his head because  _how the fuck do you people?_

Lance grins, a flash of stunningly white teeth against tanned skin, nodding and reaching over to grab Keith’s hand in that bizarre frat-guy handshake that’s more of a crushing squeeze. “Yeah, from the semester kickoff party. You were wearing the Zelda shirt and looked like someone brought you there at gunpoint.”

“I’m not a party person,” Keith grinds out, blinking like a confused, fluffy-headed owl staring at a goddamn Greek (haha. Because he’s in Beta Theta.) God and wishing for the sweet release of death.

“Yeah, it was pretty wild. Most of the stuff we have going on at the house on the weekends is way tamer,” Lance shrugs, fiddling with the drawstrings on his backpack. God, it’s like talking to an Abercrombie ad. “Mostly just beer and video games. Including Skyward Sword, if you’re up for it.”

Hunk shuts his book and slams his hands down on the table, getting up so quickly that everyone else jumps. “Pidge, I just remembered, you and I have that… thing. That thing we’ve gotta get to. Remember the thing, Pidge?”

Pidge tilts their head to the side. “What thing?”

“The _thing._ ”

“Oh, the _thing,_ ” says Pidge, eyes widening as they nod and stand up from the table as well, shoving their stuff into their backpack. “Yeah.”

In the space of five seconds, they’re both hauling ass out of the dining hall, Hunk turning to wave over his shoulder. “Well, we’re gonna go to our thing, guys; catch you later!”

“I don’t think there’s a thing,” Keith says after a minute.

“Yeah, there’s definitely not a thing,” says Lance, laughing. He’s got an earnest sort of humor to him, a dimple carving a furrow into his right cheek and dark eyes crinkling when he smiles. Another beat in time passes. He looks over at Keith, still smiling, and says, “Hi.”

Telling himself that he’s being ridiculous does nothing to stop a knot forming in Keith’s throat and ratcheting his voice up half an octave. “Hi.”

So he’s attractive. So he’s nice-looking and has an obnoxious, contagious laugh and a smile that could arguably cure cancer. That doesn’t have to mean anything. Of course it doesn’t. Thinking about the last time he looked at someone that way makes something tight and painful twist in Keith’s chest, and a vehement _never again_ rises up in the back of his mind, ripping away any other poetic musings on the way Lance McClain’s hair slips out from under his snapback and falls across his forehead.

It’s too easy for butterflies in the stomach and fleeting glances to turn into broken hearts and two-AM phone calls that tear the whole universe down around your shoulders. Never again.

Besides, Keith’s willing to bet that he’s not the most desirable thing on the Beta Theta Vice President’s hit list, anyway. He hasn’t heard a verbal _no homo_ yet, but the soccer shorts and knee socks in January kind of imply it.

Lance looks down at the pile of books scattered across the table and says, “Looks like you’re already having fun this semester. English major?”

Keith nods. “Yeah. You?”

“Astronomy and Astrophysics.”

The sense of surprise is too sudden for Keith to keep it from slipping out, placing a bookmark in _The Color Purple_ and looking up to ask, “Really?”

“Yeah, I know, I don’t really look like the astrophysics type. I get the raised eyebrow from a lot of people.” Lance covers well. Keith almost misses it, _would_ have missed it if he didn’t know what to look for from personal experience, the flash of sadness and almost-hurt in his eyes even though his cocky grin never falters, a slight inward shift of his shoulders like he wants to curl in on himself but won’t allow it.

For about the eighth time today, Keith wants desperately to sink into the ground.

“Oh, I wasn’t…” he stammers, feeling his cheeks get warm. “I’m not implying that… I wasn’t trying to…”

“Dude. Breathe. You’re fine.” The sadness is gone as quickly as it came, giving way to a light chuckle and a shrug as Lance perches his elbow on the table and rests his sharp chin on the heel of his hand. “You’re Pidge’s friend, right? They were in a couple of my math classes.”

Keith’s mouth is halfway open around the standard spiel he uses to correct people about Pidge’s pronouns before he realizes that Lance actually has it right. He stops. Blinks. After a second to process, Keith comes to the conclusion that frat boy or no, the guy seems to actually be a decent human being. Decent enough to deserve a snippet of the truth, anyway. “Yeah. We went to high school together, decided to be roommates.”

He leaves out the nastier part, the part about him aging out of the foster system at the same time Pidge’s family made them so miserable that they left the only home they'd ever known, the two of them spending the summer before their freshman year couch surfing between friends’ houses for a place to sleep, both nursing broken hearts and a consuming fear in the core of them as they looked out at the gaping maw of a future that seemed about to swallow them. It wasn’t so much a casual choice to be roommates as it was the two of them clinging desperately to each other because that was all they had left. Lance McClain with his pretty smiles and magnetic laugh doesn’t need that kind of darkness that story holds put on him. It’s easier for him to hear the abridged version.

“Right on,” Lance nods, tapping at something on the screen of his phone and only halfway paying attention.

“I’m sorry about the party,” Keith blurts out.

“Huh?”

“I just… I probably came across as really weird but I was just having a bad night and I honestly don’t know how to do human interaction very well and I—“

“You’ve really gotta work on that breathing thing, man,” Lance says, reaching out to give his arm a reassuring squeeze. He’s got delicate, long-fingered hands, but they’re strong, calluses on his fingertips. He probably plays guitar. “You’re _fine._ Seriously. I get the whole ‘crowded rooms that feel like they’re crushing you to death’ thing.”

“You seem to deal with it pretty well,” Keith replies with a nervous little almost-laugh, remembering the ease with which he’d moved around the party, talking and laughing with everyone he met, the way he sits at the center of attention like there’s no place else he’d rather be. He’s too used to his own brand of solitary sorrow to be jealous, but Lance hardly seems the type to drown in a sea of people, not when he appears to float so carelessly in the midst of everything.

“Alcohol helps,” Lance shrugs, “along with lots of practice and some passable acting skills.”

“I just…” A million things he _could_ say pile up and catch behind his teeth, and Keith would kill for a pen and paper, something to help him organize everything tumbling around in his head into something coherent instead of sitting here looking at Lance blankly. It takes time, but he finally gets a proper response formed, weighed out in carefully measured words. “I’ve seen you a lot since that night and I kept wanting to talk to you. Say thank you, y’know. For checking on me. And for the advice.”

“You said it didn’t work,” Lance points out, thin eyebrows knitting into a confused little frown.

His eyes are very dark and very distracting. Keith blinks hurriedly and looks back down at the cover of his book. “It did. Just took a little while.”

“You are really interesting, you know that?” says Lance. Keith snorts and rolls his eyes, which earns him a one-way ticket to a very cute and very persistent frat boy leaning in over the table and staring at him, a smirk curling at the corner of his mouth. “I mean it.”

“I’m really not,” Keith protests.

“Nah, I don’t accept that,” Lance refutes him, shaking his head and gesturing across the table at him with his phone in hand. “You’re one of those people who don’t know how interesting they are, which makes you even more interesting. You’ve got that whole intellectual, soulful poet thing going on.”

“I don’t write poetry. I’m a novelist.”

“See? Interesting.” And there he goes again with that mischievous, toothy grin, sprawling back in his chair and nodding over his shoulder at where the group of Thetas are still camped out at the other table. “Although, I mean, you’ve seen the people I live with. I’m pretty easy to impress.”

And for some inane, illogical reason, that makes Keith smile. Not a fragile one to convince Pidge that he’s still a functional human being, not the fake one he gives everyone at the library, but something bright and _real_ that stretches across his face and wraps around a brief huff of a laugh. “Let me guess, you’re different from other frat boys.”

“Will you smile again if I say yes?”

“Oh my _God._ ” The cackle he lets out is nowhere close to dignified, a loud snort that turns more than one head in the dining hall.

“What?” Lance asks, pouting a little.

“That was terrible,” Keith wheezes, the muscles in his stomach aching from where they’ve grown unaccustomed to honest laughter. “Did you come up with that yourself?”

Lance’s petulant look shifts to this god-awful wannabe suave attempt at a smolder, and he leans in a little further, adjusting his snapback on his head. “These terrible pick-up lines and so much more can be yours for the low, low price of hitting me up whenever you feel like it. If you feel like it, I mean. No one’s saying you have to feel like it.”

Sometimes, Keith really hates his brain. Scratch that. _Most_ of the time, Keith really hates his brain. But self-awareness of his own levels of bullshit have no correlation to being able to do anything about them. He _hates_ the way that Lance McClain even alluding to asking him out sets off the screeching of emergency brakes in his head, but that doesn’t mean he can prevent it.

He flounders for a minute, this awful, helpless sinking feeling taking over him as he knots his fingers together in his lap. “Look… I just… You’re nice and funny and hanging out sounds cool, but…”

“But someone told you that you needed to work on yourself,” Lance says.

More than one person, actually, but that’s not the most concerning matter at hand, here.

“How the hell did you know that?” Keith asks, gaping at him, an irrational spike of panic shooting down his spine. Does Lance know more than he lets on? Did Hunk say something? Did _Pidge_ say something? There’s a moment of icy terror where Keith thinks about how the only thing he’s got going for him here at Altea is that he can count on one hand the amount of people who know all those nightmarish little things about his life that have warped him into the barely-breathing mess he is today. College is where he came to run from all that shit, and if it follows him here…

The worst-case scenario spinning rapidly out of control in his head gets cut off by Lance drumming his fingers on the tabletop and muttering, “Because I’m supposed to be working on myself too.”

That sadness behind his eyes comes back for just a moment, a stitch in time where all the swagger and smirking drops like a stone and makes him look smaller, somehow. More vulnerable. Keith thinks fleetingly that this version of Lance, the boy sitting in front of him with a bittersweet smile, dwarfed in his oversized tee shirt, this looks more like someone who understands what drowning in a sea of people feels like. He feels a stab of guilt for doubting him. But then it’s gone again, covered up with the crooked angle of his mouth and something almost like hope sparking under his skin.

“So here’s what I’m gonna do. This is the ball,” Lance explains, yanking a napkin from the dispenser in the center of the table and scrawling something across it with a pen from his backpack before he slides it over to Keith. “And now it’s in your court. Keep it, put it in your phone, slam-dunk it in the trash, whatever you wanna do, man. Your ball. Your court. No pressure.”

It’s a phone number. Keith laughs embarrassingly loud again. “Everything you could have picked to say to me and you use a sports analogy.”

“I never did say that I was different from other frat boys.” Lance points out, something softening the edge of his smirk as he looks at Keith before his phone goes off in his hand and he looks down at the screen with a whispered curse, vaulting up out of the chair and walking backwards towards the doors. “But hey, I’ve gotta get to my Physics lecture. Take it easy, Keith.”

Keith watches him go, watches the door swing shut behind him before his hand tightens around the napkin and he whispers, “Yeah, you too.”

“So did he get upset when you shut him down?” Pidge asks, ambushing him as soon as he emerges from the dining hall, their nose and cheeks pink from the cold.

“I actually got his number.”

“I mean Lance is a nice guy and everything but fuckboy tears are always so _fun_ to watch—“ they continue, keeping up with their train of thought until it screeches to a halt along with them, stopping short in the middle of the sidewalk and turning around to gape at Keith. “Wait, I’m sorry, what?”

“He gave me his number,” Keith says, holding up the napkin in reference. “Apparently this is a ball and it’s in my court.”

Pidge just stands there and stares at him like he’s just confessed to first-degree murder.

“I’ll be goddamned,” they finally mutter after a long moment, turning on their heel and starting up the sidewalk again. “What are you gonna do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you gonna text him?”

“I don’t _know,_ Pidge, God, why are you so concerned?” Keith snaps, grip tightening on the strap of his backpack.

Pidge does that thing where they chew on their bottom lip, debating over saying something, before they finally let out a weary sigh of, “I just think that maybe you should give it a shot. I mean, I know you’ve shut down every person on this campus who’s tried to flirt with you up until now—“

“I do not _shut down—_ “

“You had a one-night stand freshman year and got so freaked by it that you insisted we move to a dorm on the other side of campus so you wouldn’t have to see him again.”

Keith lapses into a sullen silence, staring down at the slush blooming out from every footfall.

Pidge’s lips quirk up at the corners, but they at least have enough sympathy to not laugh at him, lacing their arm through his and bumping one bony hip into the side of his leg. “But I’m not gonna have the talk about your commitment issues with you again. I’m just saying that maybe having someone besides me to be around might help get you out of your own head a little.”

“My last relationship was a trainwreck, if you’ll remember,” Keith deadpans.

“Your last relationship ended almost four years ago, if you’ll remember,” says Pidge, hip-bumping him again and pushing their glasses up the bridge of their nose, “and no one said that you texting Lance McClain one time means you have to marry the guy. Not everything has to be serious.”

No one said that, but Keith _thought_ it, and that thought alone was terrifying enough. He knows better than to argue with Pidge on the whole ‘commitment issues’ thing – they’ve had that discourse at least ten times and Pidge consistently wins. He’s got commitment issues, and abandonment issues, and self-worth issues and about a hundred other shades of issues that have been tearing him apart for half his life, and the last time he put all of that on someone it ended in disaster and he can’t, he _can’t_ …

Lance is supposedly a work in progress too – whatever ‘working on himself’ is supposed to mean – but Keith can’t help but wonder if having someone else around who understands being broken is worth it if they both just end up sinking in to some kind of mutually destructive death spiral. Because from his experience, that’s what the definition of a close relationship with someone who isn’t indestructible (read: anyone but Pidge) is. A big, nasty, soul-wrecking, mutually destructive death spiral.

He’s quiet most of the way back to the dorm. Twenty yards from the door, he folds up the napkin and puts it in his jacket pocket and says, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it.”

Pidge nods like that’s some sort of progress, swiping at something on their phone before they look back up at him. “Well, take some time to think about it when you’re not running late. Don’t you have ROTC in like twenty minutes? You need to go change.”

That sick, sinking feeling hits him again full force.

“Oh, yeah,” he chokes out, left behind, standing in the snow as Pidge keeps trudging off towards the dorm. “I, uh… I left my uniform in the library. I’ll see you back at the room later, okay?”

Pidge doesn’t even turn around; raises their hand in a wordless wave and ducks in the front door. Keith turns around and walks the other way, straight down the sidewalk, straight past the library, straight to the most secluded place he knows: an old, unused greenhouse down the hill behind one of the science buildings, filled with dead plants and the remains of broken glass panes in the ceiling and walls.

ROTC is a demanding program, two classes per semester and mandatory events and in-uniform meetings every Monday at five. Five o’clock rolls around, and Keith’s not in uniform or at the meeting. He’s where he’s been every Monday since the beginning of the semester – curled up on the dirty floor of the greenhouse, rocking back and forth and whisper-chanting _keep breathing, keep breathing, keep breathing_ like if he says it enough his body will actually listen to him. The minutes tick by at a torturously slow pace – _keep breathing –_ an inch-by-inch progress to seven o’clock when he can get up and go back to the dorm, lie to Pidge, say the meeting was fine, pretend that none of this is happening.

_Keep breathing_

_Keep breathing_

_Keep—_

_Look up._

The sun sets early in the winter, darkness blanketed over the sky before most people are even done with dinner, and tonight is no exception, moonlight shining down through a shattered pane in the greenhouse’s ceiling and dappling soft silver light over the dusty tables and the barely-functioning excuse for a person curled up in the corner.

It’s a slow, arduous process, getting his brain out of the painful loop it’s stuck on, trying instead to think about nebulae and moonlight and how stories from thousands of years before him and this unholy mess his life has become are still alive up there, connecting the dots between the stars. He traces the line between Orion’s shoulders, and he breathes.

A few minutes later, he pulls his almost-dead phone out of his pocket and adds Lance McClain to his contacts list.


	3. NML Cygni

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NML Cygni or V1489 Cygni is a red hypergiant and one of the largest stars currently known with a radius about 1,183 times the Sun's, equal to 5.5 astronomical units. Its distance from Earth is estimated to be around 1.6 kpc, about 5,300 light-years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, everyone! Long time, no see! So, after graduating college, getting a big-girl job, and moving to sunny California, I've finally gotten a little bit of my groove back, and I've revamped Pulsar a little bit to make the story better than I'd originally planned, especially after watching Voltron season 2 and experiencing what little we know of season 3. The story's going to have some new characters, and some new subplots, all of which you'll be seeing very soon. I hope you enjoy, and sorry again about the wait!
> 
> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)

Lance can think of precisely twenty-nine things he’d rather be doing with his Saturday morning. He’s spent about thirty minutes making the list, and somewhere beneath fighting a case of post-Cinco-de-Mayo tequila shits but above jamming bamboo splinters under his fingernails, there’s hunching over a beat-up copy of _King Lear_ at the grime-covered table in the Beta Theta dining room, sweeping aside the remnants of last night’s beer pong game so he has somewhere to put his notes. His head is pounding. Questioning why an Astrophysics major even has to _bother_ with an English Lit class is a matter for about two semesters ago, and this is what he gets, sitting at the table at eleven in the morning, staring down at the yellowed pages of the third-or-fourth-hand book, watching the letters blur and warp and –

“You’re up early,” Hunk says, raising an eyebrow as he ambles through the dining room, pajama-clad with an empty coffee cup in his hand. “Or have you not been to bed yet?”

Lance groans and leans forward to rest his head against the top of the table, trying not to think about how greasy it feels.

“Shakespeare again?” Hunk calls from the kitchen, the smell of brewing coffee and bacon (God bless everything, _bacon_ , there’s still good in the world) wafting through the open archway as Lance drags himself back upright. Act II, Scene 3. Atc IS, Iceen 3. cIn Ie, eSt3c A.

“End my suffering,” he whines over the sound of breakfast cooking. Things seem a little better once Hunk puts a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast and a steaming cup of coffee between him and the book, but there’s still that paper due next week hanging over his head, taunting him. Act II, Scene 3. _I arehd yesfml oprcilam'd; nda yb teh phapy ollhow of a reet –_

_I rahed esfylm porcilam'd; dan by eth phpya llhoow fo a reet –_

_I heard myself proclaim'd; and by the happy hollow of a tree –_

“-kay? Dude?” Hunk’s voice barely makes it around the clamor in Lance’s head, fighting a fog of letters and sounding like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. “Lance?”

“I’m fine,” Lance mutters, rubbing his fingertips against his temples.

Hunk gives him the raised eyebrow again. “You sure about that?”

“I’m fine. I’m always fine.”

“Even when you look like you’re ready to rip your hair out?”

Lance glares up at him, the headache making his eyes water. “Especially then.”

Hunk just laughs, which is half annoying and half endearing, flopping down into a chair across from him and gnawing thoughtfully on a piece of bacon. Lance rolls his eyes and leans over his study setup to check his phone. “Christ on a bike, it’s been almost a week.”

“Since what?”

“Since I gave my number to Pretty Porch Boy.”

“And I’ve been _telling_ you for week to not expect much,” Hunk says, far more sagely than he has any right to, the bastard, “But the day you start listening to me is probably one of the signs of the apocalypse, so…”

“I listen to you,” Lance counters, defensive. “I just choose not to follow your advice the majority of the time.”

Hunk, the patient little beam of sunshine that he is, takes it in stride with his eye only barely twitching. “Then listen to me one more time, okay? You need to realize that Keith’s got as much shit going on as you do, if not more. It might take him a while to text you, if he ever does.”

And God, if there’s ever been a lesson in _any_ of Lance’s recent shitshows, it’s probably _Gee, I should take Hunk’s advice on shit because I’ve got a bad habit of irreparably fucking up my life when I don’t_. He’s still feeling the pain from the last time he wrote off his best friend’s advice – in his wallet to the tune of three new tires and a new windshield, and in his chest to the tune of “Broadway Baby” from Follies _,_ shut up, shut up, don’t _think_ about it, it’s over – but once again, self-awareness of being a disaster actually doesn’t do much to fix the problem.

“Maybe he’s playing hard to get,” Lance hums, fingers drumming on the dormant screen of his phone. “Do you think I should –“

“I think you should sit there, do your homework, and _leave it alone,_ ” Hunk sighs, exasperated as he leans across the table to grab Lance’s empty plate and shove _King Lear_ back towards him. “If it's meant to happen, it'll happen and…”

Hunk stops mid-sentence, chewing on his bottom lip like he's worried that he shouldn't say something, and _that’s_ never a good sign. When someone who's made a name for himself as the picture of frank but kind honesty is debating keeping something from you, it's the kind of advice you know is going to hurt. He sucks in a breath through his nose, and Lance braces himself for impact. “Look, I’m just saying, it wouldn’t hurt you to take some time for a little self-reflection and improvement after everything that happened with L-”

“ _Okay,_ Hunk,” he snaps, not willing to stick this talk out. Not this time. “The lecture’s not going to have a different effect the hundredth time you give it to me. I need to work on myself. I hear you. Okay.”

Hunk tries to say something else, but Lance is already grabbing the book and staring it down like he'd rather be setting it on fire, eyes narrowing as he works on the next line. _On trop si eerf; no lceap, ttha dagru, dna stmo alunsuu leanicivg, sdeo tno attdne ym gntaki-_

_On rpot is fere; no pecla, hatt rguda, and smot ualuuns egvicnail, oesd not etndta ym kaitgn-_

_No port is free; no place, that guard, and most unusual vigilance, does not attend my taking-_

“Mother _fucker._ ” The book hits the opposite wall of the dining room with a defeated thud, followed closely by Lance’s snapback as he lets out a frustrated groan and scrubs his hands down his face.

“Do you want me to read it to you?” Hunk asks, probably trying to be nice.

“Piss off,” Lance says, definitely not trying to be nice at all.

Hunk, thankfully, takes it in stride, huffing out a little laugh as he smashes the hat back onto Lance’s head and drops the book back in front of him. “I mean it. There’s no shame in asking for help, dude.”

Except the part where there’s plenty of shame. Except for the part where he’s twenty-fucking-one and still can't get his homework done, the part where he's in one of the most prestigious astrophysics programs on the east coast and it takes him an hour to fight through one page of Shakespeare and comprehend maybe half of it if he's lucky, the part where the only person he's ever been _not-_ ashamed of asking for help when the words get all jumbled up is now permanently unavailable for shared study sessions. Lance knows that he should swallow the burn in his throat and thank Hunk for his concern, because God knows he probably doesn't deserve it.

Instead, he flips back to his page and grumbles, “You think Neil Armstrong couldn’t make it through _King Lear?_ ”

“I think Lance McClain is a stubborn asshole,” Hunk shrugs, starting to clean up their breakfast dishes as the sound of a ringing phone cuts in over him. Lance instinctively grabs for his own, next to him on the table, a stupid little flame of hope kindling in his stomach that gets cruelly snuffed out the second he sees Hunk pull his beat-up iPhone out of his pocket and accepts the call with a “Hey, babe. Yeah. Wait, what? _What?_ ”

“Uh-oh,” says Lance, grinning with the tip of his tongue poked out between his teeth. Schadenfreude is a powerful remedy to the homework blues.

Hunk flips him off with his free hand before using it to pick up the dishes, taking the conversation into the kitchen. “Baby, slow down and tell me what happened. Yeah. Yeah… oh, shit, are you okay? Everyone’s okay? No, don't try to move anything, it’s not structurally sound. I'll be there in ten minutes. Yeah. Yeah. I love you too.”

Well, at least Lance doesn't have the worst problems of anyone on campus, by the sound of it. He spares his phone one last longing glance before going back to his battle with Act II, Scene 3, listening to Hunk stomping around the downstairs of the house.

“That was Shay,” he says, poking his head back into the dining room, pajamas swapped out for his usual godawful carpenter jeans and lumberjack shirt. He's wearing Timberlands on his feet. Shit must have truly gotten real.

“I gathered,” says Lance, trying to blink the haze from the letters out of his eyes. “What happened?”

“She was working on the set for the musical and I guess the whole thing just caved in during the middle of rehearsal. Part of the cast is trapped under scaffolding. No one’s hurt, but if they try to move it without some engineering know-how someone could get that way really fast. I've gotta go.”

“Bet You-Know-Who’s pissed,” Lance snorts.

Hunk looks scandalized that he'd even mention it in the face of such a larger catastrophe. “ _You-Know-Who_ is gonna end up with a piece of scenery through his liver if I don't get to the theater.”

“Don't get my hopes up.”

“Lance!”

“Why are you guys talking about Voldemort?” one of their frat brothers asks, walking through the living room in his boxers.

Hunk opens his mouth, closes his mouth, turns around, and walks out the front door.

With no distractions left to use as an excuse, Lance has to go back to reading, his headache growing to a roar as he stares at letters that skitter and jump and won’t stay in one place. The repeat of the Hunk Garrett “you need to work on yourself” speech didn’t do wonders for his concentration, and as a minute passes, two, the words stop even reaching his brain, blocked by memories that skitter and jump as much as the letters do – Keith laughing at his dumb pickup lines, the sound of his windshield shattering, clinging so hard to something he knew he was going to lose and being scared shitless by it, writing his phone number on a napkin, the albatross around his neck growing heavier as he holds his phone and knows that he shouldn’t want it to ring as much as he does, _you need to work on yourself, work on yourself, work on yourself…_

Working on himself, as it turns out, is a whole hell of a lot like trying to read _King Lear._ It’s possible, but it’s so hard and takes so many tries to even get through one line that looking at the whole book makes him overwhelmed to the point that he can’t start.

His phone goes off, which is probably ironic or tragic or some other literary term he was supposed to know by this point in the semester. It’s Hunk, probably halfway across campus by now, a message containing a lone YouTube link. Frowning, Lance taps at the screen and a video blooms underneath his fingers, a crisp recording of some guy in tights doing the monologue he’s supposed to be writing a paper on. Despite everything, the headache and the heartbreak and his own mind turning against him, he allows himself a fond smile and a quiet “Thanks, big guy.”

Hunk’s always been good about that, teaching him that when things like books or making yourself a decent, functional human being seem too insurmountable to start, sometimes you just have to find a different _way_ to start.

He has to watch the monologue a few times before it makes a little bit of sense, but it’s infinitely better than fighting with the paper-and-ink version, giving him the ability to just press rewind when he doesn’t get something instead of sifting back through pages of illegible bullshit. His phone goes off again, a notification pausing the video for a few seconds before Lance reads the message and lets out a victorious whoop, hopping up from the table and pumping a fist in the air. For once, it doesn’t take every ounce of effort in him to read something.

_Hey, it’s Keith._

Lance is halfway to a “fuck yeah” that promises to wake the remaining hungover sleepers in the house when his phone pings again, three times in quick succession.

_From the party. Probably should have cleared that up._

_So yeah, hey, it’s Keith from the party. And the caf. You wrote your number on a napkin._

_But you know what you did because you were the one that did it. Jesus. Anyway, hi, happy weekend._

“Oh my god, what a nerd,” Lance laughs to himself, adding the number to his contacts and carefully typing up a reply.

_Me:  
Hey!!!! Yeah, happy weekend, what’s up?_

Ping.

_Keith:  
Getting ready to run some errands. You?_

_Me:  
Fighting a losing battle with Shakespeare, haha_

The three little ‘other person is typing’ dots pop up on Lance’s screen, and he watches them with this giddy sort of sickness churning in his stomach. It shouldn’t make him feel like this, the prospect of a text from Pretty Porch Boy, especially now that he’s going to be a proper, grown-up person and take things slow and work on himself. Still, he finds himself bouncing on the balls of his feet, waiting, waiting…

Ping.

_Keith:  
I’ve given your offer some consideration, and I’ve decided that I’d like to see you again._

Ping.

_Keith:  
Oh fuck I sound like I’m inviting you to a job interview I’m sorry do you wanna go get pizza or something sometime_

Victory.

Lance does this joyous little movement that falls somewhere between ‘drunk guy trying to do a jig on St. Patty’s Day’ and ‘fine arts student trying out interpretative dance for the first time,’ grabbing his phone a little tighter and letting his thumbs hover just above the surface of the screen. For the smallest, fleeting moment, he wonders if he should text Hunk and seek counsel from the head of his order, who is both wise and powerful, but then he realizes that A) he just made a stupid Lord of the Rings reference to _himself,_ what the hell, B) Hunk is probably busy digging a certain – and surely pissed-off – person out of a collapsed theater set, and C) Hunk will probably tell him to sleep on it before making any major decisions, and Lance just… really doesn’t fucking want to do that. All things considered, he decides that he’s a big boy and can handle his own flirting, firing off another message.

_Me:  
I mean if it takes an interview for me to be allowed to hang out with you I think I have a suit somewhere lol. The pizza would be easier tho. Most of the guys are going to this thing at the Beta Rho house tonight to help out our sister sorority if you wanna come over and play Zelda or something. Pizza and beer are on me._

Keith doesn’t text back over the course of the five longest minutes of Lance’s life. He forces himself to put the phone down, go to the kitchen, dig a PBR out of the fridge (It’s almost eleven. In the immortal words of Jimmy Buffet, it’s five o’clock somewhere, and that somewhere is the place between _King Lear_ and trying to get a date where Lance’s last good nerve is humming like a too-tight banjo string), do anything but sit there and stare at Keith leaving him on _Read 10:47_ for five minutes, six, seven, eight…

Ping.

_Kieth:  
Yeah, that dossun ogod. I'ev tog msoe fstfu to od dotya, but I'll nwgsi by. Ese uyo htne!_

“Fuckin’–” Lance hisses, trying to concentrate harder for a moment before giving up and pressing the text-to-speech button.

 _“Yeah, that sounds good. I've got some stuff to do today, but I'll swing by. See you then!”_ says Siri.

He laughs and flops back into his chair, slamming a hand against the top of the table and hollering out a triumphant “Guess who’s got a date, boys?!”

The only responses he gets are some polite applause from the living room and someone upstairs yelling “Cool story, Lance, now shut the fuck up,” but even as he sits down and forces himself to go back to watching the dude in tights performing some monologue about trees, he finds that nothing, not even _King Lear,_ surprisingly, can put a damper on the electric anticipation humming in his chest.

It feels good. Not like something big or overwhelming or insurmountable. This feels like something he can start.

* * *

Keith jams his phone back into the pocket of his jeans with a sigh, looking up at the imposing silhouette of the administration building towering over his head. It had been a good idea, psychologically speaking, using a date with Lance McClain as motivation to survive what he’s about to do, but theory and practice are very different things. Date or not, Keith finds, death is sounding more and more appealing than walking through those doors.

But, he has an appointment, so what he wants doesn’t matter. He tries to tell himself to keep breathing, and that doesn’t work. He tries to look up, but it’s a gray, cloudy morning that threatens snow, no stars in sight to remind him how small his problems are in the grand scale of the universe. There’s no final bulwark against the impending breakdown screaming somewhere behind his ribs except for willpower, of which he’s got a very scant amount when it comes to shit like this, but he rolls with it because he has to, swallowing the tightness in his throat that wants him to collapse into overwhelmed sobs and barging up the stone steps and through the double doors.

The hallways are quiet. It’s not comforting quiet, though, not library-quiet with the warmth of the desk lamps and the smell of old books. It’s tomb-quiet, the absence of human presence, austere, all sharp angles in the decor and peeks into offices of neat, empty desks. Almost everyone is home for the weekend, except for the person who made a special trip here just to talk to Keith.

Death is starting to sound even better. Keep walking, keep breathing, this isn’t the end of the world (unless it is).

The business office is up another set of stairs and down another hallway, the only light in the building that’s turned on. Keith debates over knocking but decides that would look kind of weird, seeing as he’s the only person expected right now, but his hand won’t close around the door handle, this icy paralysis shooting down his spine and across his limbs when he tries.

He can’t remember the last time he was conscious and didn’t feel afraid. It’s _exhausting._

Growling a mixed string of insults and encouragements to himself, he finally manages to get the door open, revealing a lone occupant in the business office. She’s a little older than him, a statuesque Scandanavian-model-looking blonde, probably a grad student.

Well, life’s little blessings. This will at least be easier than talking to the woman who actually runs the business office, who bears a striking resemblance in both appearance and demeanor to Ms. Finster from Recess.

Model-Slash-Grad-Student looks up, smiles a dazzling smile, and says, “Hey. Keith, right?”

He just blinks at her.

Seemingly unfazed, she gets up and circles around the desk with her hand extended, waiting patiently until Keith remembers enough about how to be a person to reach out and shake it. “I’m Nyma; I’m the grad assistant here in the office. Why don’t you have a seat, and we’ll get this all straightened out.”

Keith keeps reaffirming to himself that this could be worse – she could be mean, there could be more people here, he could burst into tears at any moment – but it’s not much of a consolation prize when he can barely hear Nyma asking him what his student ID number is over the loud, wet pounding of his own heart in his ears. He folds himself down into the chair on the other side of her desk and mutters out his answer, hands jammed into the pocket of his hoodie and eyes locked on his shoes. A million miles away, there’s the sound of a keyboard clicking and then a telltale silence.

“Oh, okay,” Nyma hums, nodding as the reflection of her computer screen scrolls downwards across the lenses of her rectangular glasses. “So, your academic scholarships are all still in place, as well as your federal loans, but there’s a good chunk of money missing here that was previously filled by an ROTC scholarship in past semesters. This is an easy fix, actually. It’s probably just a clerical error; I can go back in and –”

“I dropped out.”

Nyma looks up from the screen, tilting her head to the side. “I’m sorry?”

“I dropped out of ROTC,” Keith says again, throat closing up until the words crack and he feels like he’s going into anaphylactic shock, “for personal reasons. The money’s not supposed to be there. I forfeited the scholarship.”

“Oh.” And that’s it. That’s all she says. _Oh._ If Keith had any doubts that he was fucked before, he doesn’t now.

“What are my options?” he asks, like he has any.

Lips pressing into a thin little frown, Nyma scrolls back up until she finds what she’s looking for, tapping one manicured nail against the screen. “Well, without the ROTC scholarship, your balance for this semester is sitting at four thousand, five hundred and fifty dollars. And accounts needed to be paid up by the first day of classes, so…”

“I don’t have any way to get my hands on forty-five hundred dollars,” Keith croaks out. It’s annoying, that he can see the floor right there under his shoes and still can’t shake the sensation of it opening up to swallow him whole.

Nyma seems nice. She’s got kind eyes, and she doesn’t deserve how he jerks away when she reaches over the desk to rest her hand on top of his. “Hey, it’s not the end of the world. You could take out a personal student loan to cover the rest.”

“I don’t have anyone to co-sign on a loan for me,” he says, this humorless bark of a laugh catching in his throat. “Foster kid. The system doesn’t help you with college, or anything after you hit eighteen, for that matter.”

“There’s work study –”

“Got one.”

“There’s grant money –”

“Already applied for everything I could. No dice.”

She frowns again, drumming her fingers on top of her desk and clicking her tongue against the backs of her teeth, brainstorming. Keith’s a little too busy feeling like he’s drowning in his own lungs to contribute anything valuable to the conversation, but he listens politely when she leans back in her desk chair and runs a hand through her hair, heaving out a sigh. “Well, there’s something I can do. It’s not a lot, but…”

“I’ll take anything at this point,” Keith says, and he means it. At this moment, he’d become a deep-web hitman for five grand if he had to.

Nyma clicks something on the computer and then swivels the screen around to show him, still not looking too optimistic. “I can move your payment status to ‘deferred.’ It’ll stop all the annoying emails and keep you from incurring any late fees, but if the money’s not there by the end of the semester…”

The silence is ominous, but not nearly as much as what follows it.

“I’m sorry, Keith, but if your account’s not paid in full by the end of finals, you can’t graduate.”

Keith just stares at her for a few long moments, struggling to wrap his head around it. “What… what does that mean?”

“It’s… well, it’s not up to the business office,” says Nyma, giving him this pitying look that makes his stomach turn. “The registrar won’t clear you for graduation until your account’s paid in full. That’s just how it works. You’ll have all of your classes, but you won’t be able to get your diploma, so then…”

“So then I’d just walk off into the sunset having spent the last four years working for nothing,” he finishes for her, unable to get his eyes to focus on anything but the big red $4,550 on the computer screen. “I’d have nothing.”

“Not until the account got paid off, no.” Nyma nods sadly, exiting out of the window and spinning the monitor back around to face her. “I’m really sorry. I wish there was more I could do.”

“You’ve already done more than you had to,” he tells her, undertaking the impossible task of getting to his feet without his legs giving out so he can shake her hand again. “I really appreciate it. I’ll figure something out.”

“You seem smart,” she says with a gentle smile, reaching down behind her desk to grab her bag. “I bet you will. Come on; I’ll walk you out.”

Keith waits until Nyma disappears into the labyrinth of cars parked outside the administration building to let the screaming panic that’s been cooped up until now in the hollow of his chest take him, collapsing into the corner where the outside steps meet the brick wall with a sharp wheeze. Thank God it’s a weekend at a commuter college in the middle of winter. No one’s outside to see him break down, curled up on the cold concrete with his forehead pressed to his knees, unable to breathe, tears freezing before they can finish welling up in his eyes.

Four years, for _nothing._

This is the part where he’s supposed to rally, the part where he’s supposed to get his shit together and figure something out, but the problem is that there’s nothing _to_ work out. Short of a winning lottery ticket, there’s no possibility of him finding forty-five hundred dollars before May. Accepting inevitable doom doesn’t sound like a great idea, but neither does holding on to false hope.

And then there’s the prospect of asking for help, which is just _laughable,_ honestly.

Asking for help would mean telling the truth, having to look Pidge in the eye and explain that he’s been lying since the start of the semester, how it all got to be too much, the uniforms and the orders and how everything made the screaming death spiral in his head spin a hell of a lot faster. Asking for help would mean owning up to the weakness that drove him out of the ranks, and Keith’s not anywhere close to ready for that yet. Fighting alone has always been more his style anyway, and putting a forty-five-hundred-dollar burden on someone else’s shoulders isn’t something he’s willing to do.

He calls Pidge anyway, because it’s reflex, because it’s all that he knows how to do when the world caves in around his head like this. The phone rings, and he resolves to sound _normal,_ for fuck’s sake, wills his hiccupping breaths back under control and waits, keep breathing, keep breathing…

 _“Hey, how’d your meeting with your Lit teacher go?”_ Pidge says, picking up right before their phone would have clicked over to voicemail.

“Good. Fine.” Keith takes some comfort in the fact that he sounds much more stable than he feels, his free hand clenching into a fist so tight it makes his bones ache. “Hey, where are you right now?”

 _“Funny story, actually – oh_ shit–” Pidge answers, cut off by a loud crash and the sound of people screaming on the other end of the line. _“Hunk, you dumbass, I told you that section was bearing too much weight! Oh, yeah, I’m talking to Keith. Anyway, Keith. Uh… long story short, I’m in the theater helping Hunk with a minor problem. If you wanna swing by, we could use a pair of extra hands.”_

Keith blinks. “Okay?”

 _“Awesome; see you in a few!”_ Click.

He gets up with a sigh that blooms visibly from his lips in the frigid air, looking up at the gray snow clouds overhead and musing that even if he can’t tell them the whole truth about his situation, Pidge is at least usually good at providing a distraction from the utter shitshow at hand. Keith feels selfish for doing it, but he allows himself one stolen moment before he leaves to try to pick up all his pieces, a slow breath, in, out. Thanks to Nyma the grad assistant, whatever’s coming, it’s not coming until May. This is now.

He can live with now. He has to.

A ‘minor problem,’ as Pidge had put it, turns out to be a full-scale disaster by the time that Keith makes it to the theater. There’s a pile of rubble in the middle of the stage with what looks to be several human limbs sticking out of it, a gaggle of terrified-looking theater kids huddled off to one side, and Hunk and Pidge in front of it all, looking like they’re about ready to rip each other’s faces off.

“For the last time, if you move that beam the whole thing is gonna come down!” Pidge yells, swiping their hoodie sleeve through the sheen of sweat across their forehead and glaring up across the height difference between the two of them at Hunk.

Hunk, for once in his life, isn’t having anyone’s bullshit, crossing his arms and huffing, “Y’know, if I need something coded, I’ll come to you, but seeing as _I’m the engineering major here_ –”

“You _asked_ for my help!”

“With moving set pieces, not with calculations!”

“Can you two put the pissing contest on hold until my two leads are out of immediate danger?!” A smaller voice pipes up, a girl about Pidge’s height barging between them and Hunk to interrupt the argument. She’s short but curvy, with bronze, freckly skin and kind dark eyes and a head of big, fluffy auburn curls adorned with a headset that marks her as a stage manager. Hunk has the good graces to look immediately chastised, but Pidge opens their mouth to counter, never even making it to a complaint before the girl puts up a warning finger just beyond the tip of their nose. “You can choose leave the ego at the door, or I’ll find someone who will.”

“Speak of the devil,” Hunk says, nodding towards where Keith’s standing by the side of the orchestra pit, watching this disaster unfold. “Thanks for coming to help, man.”

“Is there a reason we haven’t called maintenance or campus security for help yet?” Keith asks, hiking a leg up and crawling onto the stage to get a closer look at the situation.

“Because Shay’s scared of flunking her set design course,” a snide tenor voice calls from inside the rubble. The little stage manager – Shay, presumably – kicks at a protruding beam with a serene expression and sends an avalanche of crashing noises inwards, causing the voice to let out a girlish scream.

Hunk leans over and guides her away from the wreckage, looking more stressed than Keith’s seen him since their sophomore History final. “ _Anyway,_ this is my girlfriend, Shay. Shay, this is Pidge’s roommate, Keith.”

“Nice to meet you,” Shay says. She’s got a nice smile and a warm handshake that’s firmer than you expect it to be. “Thank you for helping.”

“Can we stop with the introductions until we’re sure I’m not going to, I don’t know, _die?_ ” The same voice says from the wreckage, petulant. “The Geek Squad has approximately five minutes to get me the _fuck_ out of here before I pitch the most _unholy bitch fit_ –”

“You can behave yourself, or I can send a certain someone the video I took of you crying like a little baby when we moved the first beam, and you _know_ it’ll be on social media within five minutes,” Hunk says, very calm. The voice shuts up.

“So what exactly are we looking at here?” Keith asks, frowning at the mess of lumber and canvas.

“The whole set was interconnected because I thought that would make it structurally stronger,” Shay explains, looking distraught. “And I mean, in a way I was right. The set stayed together. But there was a bridge component that wasn’t strong enough to support two people, and when that caved in… well.”

“We’ve been disassembling the set a few pieces at a time,” Pidge picks up where Shay left off, gesturing to a pile of rubble on the other side of the stage. “We’ve almost got them out, but we’re afraid if we move that last big flat to give them an exit, then everything else will cave in. So, at the moment, they’re stuck.”

“Shaaaay, can you go home and get vodka?” The voice inside the rubble whines. “If I’m going to be stuck in here I at least want to be tipsy for it.”

“Is your costar even alive in there?” Keith asks, already put off by whoever it is.

“She’s fine, I think. She might be in shock, I don’t fucking know. Gina, are you in shock?”

“No…” a significantly smaller, more scared voice says.

“See, she’s fine,” the voice continues over Gina, and one of the hands sticking out of the wreckage waves dismissively. “ _I,_ however, have a hot yoga class in two hours and if I miss it there will be _hell to pay, still waiting on that vodka, B.T.W. –_ ”

“Theater majors be like,” Hunk sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. Everything is quiet for a moment, but then his eyes open, widen, and he looks from Keith to Pidge with something like hope. “Do you think if we had something to replace the flat when we lifted it, really quick, like _Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom_ style…”

“It could maintain the structural integrity, yeah,” Pidge nods after a moment. “But what would we use?”

“I mean, me,” Hunk shrugs.

“Absolutely not; next idea,” Shay interjects, shaking her head so hard that her curls flop back and forth a second out of sync with the motion.

“Babe, it’d only be for the five seconds it would take them to get out –”

“Fuck _off,_ Hunk, next idea!”

“We don’t have any other ones!” he says, throwing his hands up in the air. “Not that don’t involve getting the proverbial grown-ups involved, and I’m not letting you fail a class, okay? I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, Christ,” Shay murmurs into her hands, turning away and taking a deep breath. “Okay. Okay, just hurry and do it before I have a heart attack.”

Hunk leans over and plants a kiss on the top of her head before turning back to Pidge and Keith, pointing to the flat in question. “So on my count, you guys are gonna haul that flat upright and keep it that way so it doesn’t destroy school property by falling into the orchestra pit. I move in and brace the scaffolding, our trapped actors haul ass out of there, and then I let everything drop onto the stage, followed by you guys gently laying the flat down because I’m pretty sure it took my girlfriend like a week to paint it. Everybody clear on the plan?”

“Got it,” Keith and Pidge nod in unison.

“Jesus, Grand Slam, why couldn’t you think of this an hour ago?” The voice inside the rubble snarks.

Shay pokes a broom handle into the wreckage, drawing out an offended, pained shout. “Quiet, you.”

Keith and Pidge move into place on either side of the flat, bracing their shoulders against its wooden frame while Hunk edges in beside them, holding one hand against the scaffolding that’s leaning inwards against the flat’s structure. “Okay. One, two, three _go go go you two go –_ ”

Keith throws all of his weight against the flat, and it comes up easier than he expected it to, the painted canvas blocking his view of the chaos on the other side as he and Pidge hold it steady to keep it from tipping over into the orchestra pit. There’s the sound of two sets of footsteps, Hunk cursing, and finally the unholy metal screech and clatter of the scaffolding falling to the floor.

“Everyone okay?” Hunk asks, apparently okay enough himself to be able to articulate the question.

“We’re good,” Pidge wheezes, their glasses fogging up as they struggle to keep their side of the flat upright. “You good?”

“And _I,_ the person who was trapped on the brink of death for two hours, am _fine._ Thanks for asking, everyone.” The voice from inside the wreckage is clearer now, a confident, brassy tenor a few feet to Keith’s right that fades steadily away towards the door. “Nice save, Grand Slam. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going home and calming my nerves.”

There are footsteps and a door opening before Keith and Pidge get the flat settled on the stage. The only thing of the voice’s owner that Keith manages to see is a swish of silvery hair around the corner of the door frame before the stage door swings shut, but he’s not paying that much attention anyway, leaning forward with his hands on his knees and panting. “I leave you guys alone for two hours…”

“Never a dull moment, huh?” Hunk laughs, clapping Keith on the back so hard that he’s pretty sure it stops his heart for a second. “So, lunch? I think everyone needs a break before reconstruction efforts start.”

The survivors of the disaster all move towards the dining hall in a solemn herd, with Hunk, Shay, Keith, and Pidge bringing up the rear. The four of them get their food and settle into a table, and Keith realizes somewhere around the second bite of his burger that he hasn’t thought about the forty-five hundred dollars since he left the administration building. Distraction can be a powerful force for good, apparently.

“Thank you again for helping, Keith,” Shay says, wrapping her arm around his shoulders in a half-hug and ruffling his hair. Even from the five minutes of conversation he’s had with her, he can tell she’s incredibly sweet. She and Hunk make a lot of sense. “I’m going to be up all weekend rebuilding that set, but I’m just glad no one got hurt. I feel so stupid.”

“You’re not _stupid,_ babe,” Hunk says, reaching across the table to give her other hand a squeeze. “It was one misplaced support beam. It could have happened to anyone.”

“Yeah, and you’ve gotta admit that it was pretty funny watching the absolute meltdown that – oh, hey, Lance!” Pidge cuts themself off, waving across the dining hall until Lance McClain comes over and grabs himself a chair at the end of their table. Lance has on his standard Beta Theta hoodie and galaxy snapback, somehow managing to look like a model in it, the asshole. Keith is suddenly, painfully aware of how sweaty and gross he looks.

“Hey, you,” Lance grins, edging his chair closer to Keith before acknowledging everyone else. “I’m guessing the disaster at the theater had a relatively happy ending?”

“No one died,” Hunk says, gesturing boredly with his fork. “Pidge and Keith helped. How’s the Shakespeare going?”

“Painfully,” Lance answers, laughing, before he turns over to the other side of the table. “Hey, Shay.”

Keith practically gets whiplash from how fast Shay’s demeanor changes, switching instantly from sweet smiles and doe eyes to the meanest face he’s seen _anyone_ wear in a long time. “Fuck you.”

Lance acts like it doesn’t even bother him, shifting his attention away from her with a sharp, concise little nod. “Okay, so we’re still at that point, excellent.”

Hunk and Pidge start making awkward small talk, but Lance ignores them both in favor of looking over at Keith with this conspiratorial smile and asking, “So… beer and pizza?”

“Beer and pizza,” Keith nods, trying and failing not to smile along with him. “What’s this I hear about you and my boy Shakespeare having a fight?”

Lance leans back in his chair and sighs a long-suffering sigh. “ _King Lear_ is kickin’ my ass, dude. I’m gonna be an astronaut; why do I need to know this shit?”

“Because when you meet the aliens, you need to be able to talk to them about the fundamentals of Earth culture,” says Keith, pointing at him with a French fry. “Also because we’re a liberal arts university and they want us all to be ‘well-rounded’ and pay a bunch of money for classes we don’t need. Ask me how I did in Chemistry.”

“Probably about as well as I’m doing with Shakespeare,” Lance laughs, that same melodic laugh that he’s had since the night of the party. Keith may or may not be staring a little, and Lance may or may not catch him, leaning in a bit closer and purposefully making his voice suggestive, the little shit, “I’ll tutor you if you tutor me.”

“I’m done with all my science classes, and as fun as watching you wrestle with Shakespeare sounds, I’d still charge you for it,” Keith snorts.

“You wound me,” says Lance, all faux-dramatic with a hand over his chest. This close, Keith can see that his eyes aren’t dark like they seem at first glance, but rather a deep blue, catching the angle of the sunlight coming through the window. He forgets what his comeback was going to be.

He feels… not-horrible, which is strange. Yes, there’s still the weight of everything hanging over his head. There’s still the knowledge of the reckoning that’s inevitably coming, still all the shit in his head that never leaves him alone, not really, but there’s also this. There’s Pidge laughing at something across the table and Hunk retelling his epic feat of strength back at the theater and there’s Lance, sitting there with that crooked smile, making him laugh despite everything that says he shouldn’t. It’s an unexpected relief, one he’ll take while he can.

“You know, if we’re still on for tonight and you’ve got nothing else to do, you can just head back to the house with me after this,” Lance offers.

Across the table, Shay narrows her eyes, purses her lips, shoves herself to her feet, and walks briskly out of the dining hall. The remaining four of them are silent for a moment.

“What’s up with her?” Pidge asks, confused.

“Shit,” Hunk groans, getting to his feet and following her out into the courtyard.

“Anyway,” Lance says, drumming his hands on the table, “I believe you and I have a date in the land of Hyrule, sir. Shall we?”

Keith’s got a weird feeling in his stomach. He’s never had much going for him, but solid instincts are one thing he’s got a legitimate claim to, and his gut is saying that there’s more going on here than what he’s seeing. Beneath the smoothness of his voice, there’s a little spark of panic in Lance’s eyes. Pidge looks about as confused as Keith feels, so they don’t know anything he doesn’t. But then there’s Hunk, who’s acting like the simple act of having lunch is some kind of volatile political summit. And then, even more unsettlingly, there’s Shay, who seemed like one of the top three nicest people Keith had ever met right up until Lance came within a ten-yard radius. He won’t say anything about it here and now, both because it’s rude and because Pidge will call him out on his social paranoia for the umpteenth time, but something’s off.

“Yeah, sure, just let me put my tray away and we’re good,” Keith says, grabbing his stuff and ducking around into the other side of the dining hall where the tray return is. Conveniently, there’s also a door to the courtyard on the opposite corner, and Keith pulls off some ninja shit that he’s honestly pretty proud of to get over there without Lance and Pidge seeing him, ducking through the door and making a beeline to where Hunk and Shay are arguing next to a picnic table.

“-fault that you didn’t think to _tell me_ about this,” Shay’s hissing at him, whipping her phone out of her purse and starting a new message.

“Hey, what are you –” Hunk says, sounding panicked even though his back is turned to Keith, blocking the view of his face. “Are you texting him about this? Do _not_ text him!”

“He deserves to know!”

“He lost all rights to know anything after all that shit with Lance – don’t give me that look; you know he’s not innocent in all of that – It’s _over,_ babe. Let it be over.” Hunk sounds like an odd mix of desperate and _tired,_ reaching out to push a stray curl of Shay’s hair off her forehead. “Besides, Keith’s a good guy and this would open up a can of worms on him. He doesn’t deserve that kind of –”

“What do I not deserve?” Keith asks, plopping down on the bench portion of the picnic table between them.

Hunk blinks like someone’s just shined a strobe light in his eyes, looking around for the nearest exit. “And what do you know, I’m late for class.”

“Hunk, it’s Saturday–”

“Bye!”

He all but sprints for the door, leaving Shay and Keith in his wake, alone in the courtyard as a few scattered snowflakes begin to fall. Keith sighs and looks over at her, raising an eyebrow. “So are you going to be the one who’s telling me what’s going on here, or…”

Shay sits down on the bench beside him, a sudden fatigue pulling down at her shoulders. She’s got on a sweater that’s a few sizes too big for her, and her hands disappear inside the sleeves as she tucks her heels up onto the bench and wraps her arms around her knees. “You know, I wish I could, because Hunk’s right. You seem like a really nice guy. But we’ve all got people in our lives that we have to look out for, and I’ve got to look out for my people. Well, my person. I can’t tell you the story because it’s not my story to tell. All I can tell you is that you should be careful. Lance isn’t who he pretends to be, and you seem like too good of a person for me to want to watch you get hurt.”

“That’s… cryptic,” Keith says, frowning.

“Unfortunately, that’s all I can give you in good conscience,” says Shay, standing up and zipping her jacket. A second later, her phone goes off, and she picks it up with a grim expression. “Hello? Hey, okay, you can stop yelling whenever you want, pal, I just thought you needed to know- …of course I did. Of _course_ I did. No… no. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Because you don’t know the whole story yet, that’s why! Well, I don’t know the whole story either, that’s why we need to–… Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I’m on my way home. Stay put and don’t do anything stupid. Bye.”

Shay hangs up her phone with this exhausted little groan, and Keith says, “Why do I feel like I’ve signed up for way more drama than I ever intended to?”

“Because you did,” Shay says, going up on tiptoe to press a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you so much for helping save my ass back at the theater. You’re a good friend, Keith. Stay warm, and… and be careful. I’ve gotta get home. I’ll see you around.”

She walks out of the courtyard and across the quad, huddled in her jacket against the cold, and Keith walks back inside considerably more apprehensive than he’d been a moment ago.

“Did you get run through the dishwasher or something?” Lance asks when he makes it back to the table, giving him an expectant look.

“Bathroom,” Keith shrugs, grabbing his backpack. “C’mon, I’ve had a long day and this guy I know promised me beer and pizza.”

“So he did,” Lance nods, nudging his shoulder against Keith’s as he edges around the table and heads for the front door. “We can take the shortcut across the quad if you don’t mind getting your shoes a little slushy.”

“What the hell is going on?” Pidge mutters to him as they head to the door several steps behind Lance, looking up at Keith over the rims of their glasses.

“I don’t know,” he answers under his breath, “but I’ll tell you when I do. I’ll be back later tonight. Don’t wait up.”

Pidge stands at the door to the dining hall and watches them walk away, and Keith has the thought about halfway across the quad that distraction is kind of a double-edged sword. Sure, he’s not thinking about the forty-five hundred dollars, but that doesn’t mean his mind is at ease.

No, he’s walking through the snow thinking about Lance McClain and what he’s hiding behind those crooked smiles and bad pickup lines, and he hopes it’s nothing sinister. God, he hopes it’s nothing sinister. It would be so nice to just have something _good._

* * *

Lance’s face is numb by the time they’re halfway back to the Beta Theta house, a tide of irritated, mustered cursing caught behind his chattering teeth as he hunkers down in his hoodie and starts to pray for either heat or death.

Keith looks over at him and laughs, strolling through the oncoming snow like he’s out for a walk in the park. “You’re not from Pennsylvania, are you?”

“Miami,” Lance says, shivering. “Where the weather makes _sense._ ”

“You guys have hurricanes.”

“I’d take a hurricane over this,” he huffs, elbowing Keith in the ribs. “How about you, over there all hearty lumberjack and shit. You from the neighborhood?”

“Pittsburgh,” Keith says, his eyes going sort of glassy. “Ish.”

“Ish?”

“I moved around a lot as a kid.”

Something tells Lance to leave it at that, and for once, he listens to the voice of reason in his head, the fact that it sounds a lot like Hunk notwithstanding. Instead, he focuses on making it back to the house without contracting hypothermia, icy fingers fumbling with his keys and a sigh of relief passing his lips when the front door gives way to the sweet, sweet warmth of ancient and probably dangerous baseboard heaters. “Anyway, we have a large selection of domestic brews – just kidding, PBR or Bud Light?”

“Why does Shay hate you?” Keith asks.

“Fuck,” Lance says before he can stop himself.

“PBR’s fine,” Keith says, flopping down on the couch like he didn’t just ask something that makes Lance want to find the nearest hole and crawl into it.

He forces himself to make his feet move, into the kitchen, to the fridge, back to the living room. It’s like watching someone else go through the motions of his own life. He’s not sure why he’s so _scared,_ but the pounding of his heart when he drops the can of beer into Keith’s hand is enough to tell him that he is, rising into his throat and making his next words come out stilted and raspy. “Did Shay say something to you?”

“Do you think she said something to me?”

“I… I don’t know,” says Lance, disturbingly honest about it. If Shay had told him _everything,_ Keith wouldn’t be here right now, but there’s always the possibility that she may have told him just enough.

Keith shrugs, cracking open his beer and grabbing the Wiimote off the coffee table. “Shay’s just like… the nicest person in the world, but she’s totally stone-cold to you, and I’m wondering why that is. What’d you do to her?”

“It’s not what I did to Shay, and it’s a long story,” Lance says. Keith gives him a look that very clearly says that shit won’t cut it. He grumbles and rubs at the headache blooming in his temples. “Look, it’s this really drama-filled, ridiculous, _personal_ business that you do _not_ need to be involved in, okay? In short, I’ve got some really fuckin’ bad blood with someone who’s very close to Shay, and she hates my guts because of it. She’s somewhat civil with me for Hunk’s sake, but if we were ever around each other without him there, she’d rip my throat out. Is that an adequate explanation?”

It doesn’t even begin to touch an adequate explanation. For an adequate explanation, Lance would need about three hours to tell the story from the very beginning, from a party not so different from the one where he met Keith to holding hands in the darkened planetarium to being so in love that just breathing felt like flying to watching it all fall apart to coming outside to see his car all jacked up in the middle of the night. It’s not an adequate explanation, and he knows it, and Keith knows it, and that understanding settles between them like a stone.

Keith looks at him silently for a long stretch of time. The house is quiet with everyone either gone for the weekend or down the road at Beta Rho helping the girls in their sister sorority set up for a big joint party, and the glow from the TV is a soft blue, and Keith sits there and watches him with those bottomlessly dark eyes. It only feels a bit like torture.

“Yeah, that checks out,” he says eventually, nodding at the empty space next to him on the couch. “C’mon, let’s eat pizza and save a princess.”

Between the two of them, they end up polishing off a case of beer and two frozen pizzas, one of them slightly burnt because they were too engrossed in Keith taking on a dungeon to hear the oven go off. Halfway through the Temple of Time, they’re both pretty solidly intoxicated, and Keith is inventing some colorful profanities as Link falls into a lava pit for the fifth time.

“Do they teach you to swear that poetically in the English department?” Lance snorts, polishing off the cheap whiskey he’s been nursing in a plastic cup for the past half hour, a smirk pulling at his lips.

“Call it an innate talent,” Keith snarks back, giving up on his quest and clicking through options on the remote until the Wii turns off and the TV settles on the Steelers game. He’s prettier than he has any right to be, in his too-big sweatshirt with messy hair and his legs tucked up in front of him so he looks like some kind of ridiculously endearing gargoyle. “What about you? Astronomy, yeah? Doesn’t seem to fit, with you being, y’know…”

“A dumb frat boy?”

“I never said that!”

“You didn’t have to,” Lance mutters, only a little bit hurt, picking one of his textbooks off the coffee table and leafing through it. “I don’t know, dude. ‘I like space’ sounds like a fucking awful reason to pick a major but… I like space. It’s big, and beautiful, and it’s got a lot of possibilities. Plus, Astronomy’s got a lot of math. I like numbers better than words. No offense.”

“None taken,” Keith says, reaching over Lance to grab his copy of _King Lear_ off the table. There’s a gentleness in the way he holds the book, a reverence that Lance hasn’t really seen in him before as he opens the covers and traces his fingertips over the first few lines of text. “I like words. Writing words. I mean… talking words doesn’t… I’m shit at communication. Being able to write it down or read it helps.”

“Opposite problem, bro,” Lance laughs, but it’s tired, as heavy as the dull thud of his book hitting the table when he tosses it down. “Dyslexia’s a bitch. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little kid, and all my teachers always told me I’d be too dumb to do it. So I got smart out of pure spite. And here I am. I guess that’s why I picked Astronomy. How ‘bout you?”

Keith looks at him like he wants to say _I’m sorry,_ and Lance is glad that he doesn’t. He got over the part of his life where he wanted pity a long time ago. When you’re the underdog at something, people usually supply you with pity, ridicule, or some mixture of both. Asking for an equal shot never goes well, so you just come to expect one of the other two from any given person you meet. Keith doesn’t ridicule him, and he doesn’t pity him, which makes Lance think that maybe he’s an underdog too. It’s a comfort he didn’t know he wanted, finding someone and feeling like they’re standing on equal ground.

“It’s kind of… I don’t know,” says Keith, soft and contemplative, going back to tracing the lines of _King Lear_ and not looking Lance in the eye. “I want what you want. Big and beautiful and full of possibilities. But everything in my life’s always felt so _small_ , y’know? Like, everywhere you turn, there’s a wall. You grow up in a world that feels small like that, and you start to feel like you’re small, too.”

Lance is quiet for a long time, but the silence isn’t uncomfortable, fading into the faint commentary of the game as the TV screen flickers a kaleidoscope of color across the sharp, elegant planes of Keith’s cheeks. Finally, he reaches down, casual, like he could be reaching for the remote and ended up with Keith’s hand in his instead. It feels warm, comfortable, terrifying in how easy it is.

Very quietly, very earnestly, he says, “I don’t think you could ever be small like that, Keith.”

“You don’t know me,” Keith answers. He sounds like he’s scared of that changing, and it breaks Lance’s heart.

“I’d like to.”

“You’re awful at flirting.”

“And you’re awful at lying,” Lance laughs, kicking his heels up on the coffee table. “And even if I don’t know you, I know space enough to know that everything’s a matter of perspective.”

He remembers the night of the rush week party, remembers Keith looking so lost as he stared out at the trees and the snow. No one deserves to feel that lost, especially not… Well, Lance will be the first to admit that he dives into things too fast and clings to people too hard, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Keith deserves to be happier than he is. Even if it means making a bad decision or five, he’d like to help him figure out where to find that happiness, or at least find where to look.

He flips through his Astro textbook until he lands on the page he was looking for, shoving it into Keith’s lap and pointing at the picture in the top right corner. “Okay, so this star, it’s called NML Cygni. It’s the biggest star in the universe, one thousand one hundred eighty-three times bigger than our sun. But here on the ground, the Sun looks like… well, it looks like the Sun, and NML Cygni is just this little speck in the sky. Perspective, dude. That’s what it’s all about.”

“I’m not a star,” Keith snorts, leaning forward to grab the Wiimote and take another crack at Zelda now that he’s sobered up a bit. “With lines like that, you sure you don’t want to take a stab at the English department?”

“I’ll leave the monologues to you, Boy Shakespeare.”

“Oh, fuck off. I’m totally J.D. Salinger.”

“Your author jokes are kinda wasted on the half-illiterate dude. Sorry.”

Keith tries really, _really_ hard to keep a straight face, but Lance can see him start to cave. The corner of his mouth twitches, and his eyes crinkle up, and he sputters out this goofy laugh that grows even louder and goofier until they’re both clutching their stomachs and cackling like idiots.

“You should smile more,” Lance says, after they catch their breaths. Keith, surprisingly, listens to him. He’s got this unassumingly pretty kind of smile, soft and _real,_ and Lance feels a little bit blessed for having the chance to see it. Something sad in him whispers that it’s probably a rare sighting.

Lance knows himself, probably a little too well. He knows that he dives in too fast and clings to people too hard and eventually loses everything. He knows that in the long run, he can’t hold on to anything good without figuring out some way to poison it. But this, right here, tonight, with Keith fighting bokoblins and laughing and leaning over to rest his head on Lance’s shoulder, this is good. It’s good. And maybe the long run might have something different to say about it, but for tonight, he can hold on to it.

He can, so he does. Maybe to anyone else it would seem like something so insignificant, letting himself have something that makes him feel okay after everything that typically hangs out in the darker corners of his mind picked today to rear its ugly head, but Lance knows about perspective almost as well as he knows about himself, and sees it for what it is – a little speck in the sky, bigger in what it represents than most people could understand.


	4. Solar Flare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> so·lar flare  
> /ˈsōlər fle(ə)r/  
>  _(noun)_  
>  a brief eruption of intense high-energy radiation from the sun's surface, associated with sunspots and causing electromagnetic disturbances on the earth, as with radio frequency communications and power line transmissions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a [tumblr.](http://southspinner.tumblr.com)
> 
> This chapter's very near and dear to me for many reasons, not the least of which that my [trash fav](http://pin.it/8arM_FU) is finally here to steal the whole fic (and your heart, eventually, I promise). Broadway Baby's singing a song later in the chapter and [here it is.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BiSTFRJlw)

Keith learns the hard way that after about forty-eight hours of sleep deprivation, the human brain starts doing some really weird shit.

Between the looming specter of his unsolvable debt crisis, the utter bitch-slapping handed down to him by his first round of papers for the semester, and the fact that he’s kind of had crippling, untreated anxiety for at least eighteen of his twenty-one years, sleep has been a hard thing to come by lately. On the morning in question, a miserable Wednesday with gray skies and ankle-deep slushy snow, he’s starting to feel somehow disconnected from his own consciousness, like he’s watching a robotic version of himself in the library scanning in books. Pick one up. Push the button on the scanner. Beep. Onto the cart. Push push push. Beep beep beep. He can see his hands shaking from the triple-shot of espresso he just drank, but he can’t feel it. A million miles away, someone is talking.

“-eith? Earth to Keith?” A million miles is suddenly two feet, and Allura’s leaning on the other side of his book cart, her normally cloudy hair woven into silver microbraids that she’s got up in a big, high bun at the top of her head. She looks less _Vogue_ and more Instagram Model today, feather earrings and John Lennon eyeglasses and a thick, oversized beige sweater sheltering her from the cold that still finds its way into the library. Lowering the aforementioned glasses, she raises an eyebrow at him. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

“I’m sorry,” he groans, blinking slowly. The sleep deprivation tells him that he can hear the sandpaper sound of his eyelids scraping across his eyeballs. “All-nighter. Big paper coming up.”

Allura gives him a sympathetic grimace and click of her tongue, hopping up to sit on the empty side of the book cart. “I was saying, remember my friend who just started his masters? The TA? He’s getting a bunch of grad students together for dinner tonight if you want to tag along.”

Keith snorts and checks in a book on Viking metalworking techniques. “I’d prefer to not be the baby at the party.”

“We’ll get you a juice box,” Allura grins, reaching over and pinching his cheek. “And TA friend is a good bloke, and he’s _cute…_ ”

“I’ve got to study, Allura,” he grouses, batting her hand away. “Besides…”

Besides, he’s been texting Lance McClain almost nonstop since their Zelda date (Was it a date? He called it a date. Did he really mean it was a date?) over the weekend. Besides, they eat lunch together more often than not now, and sometimes Lance hangs out on the stretch of the quad outside the library and waits for Keith to get done at his work-study so he can walk him back to the dorms. Besides, he’s dorky and funny and maybe Allura’s TA friend is a good bloke and cute, but there’s something stupidly endearing about the fact that the vice president of Beta Theta is trying _so_ damn hard, throwing an arsenal of horrible pickup lines at some scraggly little nobody from the English department.

“Besides?” Allura asks, her head perking up like a nosy British meerkat.

Besides, Keith likes him. And that’s _terrifying._

“Nothing,” he says, softer than he means to, shaking his head and checking in his pile of books with renewed focus.

Allura’s having approximately none of it. “Spill, or I’ll go through the stacks and wreak _havoc,_ Keith, I swear.”

“It’s nothing!”

“Biographies in the fantasy section, encyclopedias out of alphabetical order…”

“You fucking monster,” he says, affronted. He doesn’t doubt she’ll do it, though, so he follows close behind with, “Besides, I’m already kind of talking to someone, is all.”

 _“What –_ ”

“Keith?” Speaking of nosy and British, Keith’s boss picks the perfect moment to round the corner, looking frazzled, coffee stains on his tie and usually magnificent ginger mustache sticking out at an awkward angle. Keith barely has time to catch the loaded cart that gets shoved at him, carried back a couple inches with the momentum. “I need these reshelved. The Shakespeare class just finished their papers and the front desk is a war zone.”

“On it, Coran,” he says, sidestepping Allura with a victorious grin and coasting gracefully away from the potential embarrassment of the topic at hand.

“This conversation isn’t over!” Allura calls after him.

“Yeah it is,” he says, not looking back but raising one hand in a parting wave as he wheels the cart back into the stacks.

It’s a small respite from the roaring caffeine headache winding up behind the front of his skull, the almost amniotic tranquility of the stacks. Keith practically lived between the shelves his freshman year, grateful for the quiet and the comforting presence brought on by the smell of old books. Even now, with all the shit he’s got on his shoulders, he breathes a little easier, methodically slotting volumes of Shakespeare back into where they belong on the shelves. Neat. Tidy. Orderly. Everything exactly where the good old Dewey Decimal System says it should be. It’s therapeutic.

He pauses on a beat-up copy of _King Lear,_ remembering snatches of conversation from Saturday, and flips to the back cover. Barcodes and computer lab aside, Coran still runs the Altea University library like the Internet doesn’t exist, rolodexes and date stamps and checkout slips, something about how when society collapses everyone will thank him for preserving knowledge in the only way that’s truly foolproof. Sure enough, right there in the back of _King Lear_ on the most recent space at the bottom of the checkout slip, there’s an inked student ID number and _Lance McClain_ in absolutely horrible penmanship. Keith traces his fingertips over the letters and allows himself a small smile.

“You know he’s going to fuck you over, right?” says a voice behind him, a confident, brassy tenor piercing the quiet and making him jump about a foot in the air.

It takes a moment to stave off what’s probably a minor heart attack brought on by caffeine and being startled, but Keith makes a solid effort to collect himself, shoving Lance’s copy of _King Lear_ back on the shelf and turning around. “Excuse me?”

The guy who’s somehow materialized right behind him manages to look simultaneously like he’s out of his element in the library and yet somehow owns the place – tall, moon-pale, delicate but defined facial features straight out of Greek antiquity, long dyed-silver hair under a big black felt sunhat, eyes such a vibrant shade of amber-hazel that they almost look feline. It’s below freezing outside, but apparently that’s not a good enough excuse to stop him from dressing like a witch come to lay a curse upon your village, tight black jeans and this sheer black flowy batwing-sleeved concoction of a shirt, black oxfords. No coat. Marble statues don’t feel the cold. He’s one of those people who are so good-looking that it’s _intimidating,_ leaning back against a shelf of Herman Melville and watching Keith with this cool, analytical stare.

“Lance, I mean,” the guy says, examining his nails. He looks at Keith like he’s dense for not getting the message the first time, perching a hand on his hip and enunciating slowly. “He’s going to fuck you over. That’s what he does.”

Keith blinks at him. “And, uh… who are you, exactly?”

The guy raises an eyebrow. For such a small motion, it’s kind of terrifying. “We’ve met. You don’t remember me? Rude.”

Keith doesn’t, until suddenly he does. The lilting, mocking inflections of the voice, the sense of entitlement to anyone and everyone’s attention – these are both things he’s heard before. “Oh my God, you’re the guy who was trapped in the theater.”

Tall, Pale, and Unfairly Handsome smiles this perfect, horrifying, eat-you-alive-with-my-porcelain-veneers smile and says, “Excellent observation, Kyle.”

“Keith.”

“Kody,” he shrugs with a dismissive wave of his hand, leaning across the book cart in a way that definitely harkens a comparison to a puma getting ready to pounce. “And _I’m_ Lotor, by the way.”

A beat of silence, two, and Keith makes an executive decision to stop looking like he’s any way impressed. Anyone that feels the need to grandstand this much, he reasons, has _got_ to be mostly bark and a relatively inconsequential bite – at least, he really fucking hopes so, and puts enough stock in that hope to shoot him an expectant look, a silent _Yeah, and that’s supposed to mean something_? It must work, because it earns him a scowl and an offended little scoff.

“You know, I really don’t see the attraction,” says the guy – Lotor, apparently – sidestepping the book cart and prowling this slow circle around where Keith’s standing between two shelves, giving him that analytical up-and-down again followed by a disapproving noise. “Kind of mousy, aren’t you? And obviously unaware that dressing like Kurt Cobain stopped being cool about a decade ago.”

Keith’s chest goes cold and tight, voice catching in his throat. “There’s no _attraction_ –”

“A little birdie told me otherwise,” Lotor smiles, the sweetness in it so fake that Keith can taste aspartame, holding up his phone and giving it a little shake. The motion wakes up the device and shows the lock screen, a Snapchat-filtered picture of Lotor in a digital flower crown standing next to a smaller girl – freckles, big auburn curls, kind eyes, bright smile.

“A little birdie named Shay?” Keith asks, wanting to kick himself for feeling slightly betrayed. Shay had said herself back in the dining hall on Saturday that she had people to look out for. The pieces were all there, but it’s his own fault for not putting them together fast enough to get a glimpse of what was coming before it mercilessly sucker-punched him in the middle of his shift.

“Roommate and verified bestie,” Lotor nods, clicking the phone off and slipping it in his pocket before looking back up at Keith, something in his eyes colder than before. “So let’s cut the crap, shall we?”

“Is there a reason you’re bothering me at work?” Keith sighs, reaching around him to grab another armful of Shakespeare off the cart and slipping the books back onto the shelf. From what he knows of this particular flavor of theater majors, they require a steady diet of attention to survive, so maybe ignoring him will make him go away.

“ _Bothering_ you? Honey, this is a _courtesy call_.” With a patronizing laugh, Lotor leans back against the shelf where Keith’s trying to work, tiptoeing his fingers down across the worn tops of the books. “Anybody dumb enough to get within fifty yards of Lance McClain is obviously either self-destructive or blissfully ignorant.”

“And clearly you’re an authority on Lance.”

“Well, up until two months ago I was his boyfriend, so yeah, I’d call myself an authority.”

A copy of _As You Like It_ stops halfway to the shelf. For a very long second, Keith has to remember how to breathe and remind himself that a reaction is as good as a death sentence, staring at the call numbers on the sides of the shelved books until everything blurs together into something that reminds him of the worry in Lance’s eyes on Saturday, the way he’d been in such a hurry to get Keith away from whatever it was he didn’t know about, the warning he’d felt in Shay’s words and in the pit of his own stomach that comes back full-force and makes him feel ill.

He could panic. He could take the bait. Instead, he chalks one up for mental fortitude and shoots Lotor a dirty, sidelong look and deadpans, “Gee, I wonder why he broke up with you.”

Lotor smiles again, a malevolent smile, an I’d-like-to-tear-into-your-flesh-with-my-well-manicured-nails smile, and asks in the breeziest of voices, “Oh, _that’s_ what you think happened?”

“What did happen?” Not taking the bait is all well and good, but then there’s this pesky sensation getting in the way, the nagging bite of his instinct in the back of his head that won’t leave well enough alone. Maybe Keith will eventually learn that old lesson about curiosity and cats, but today is not that day.

“Why don’t you ask Lance?”

“I…” There are plenty of reasons for that, but none that Keith is willing to discuss with a complete stranger. “Look, man, whatever shit you’re trying to stir up here, I’m not getting involved. I’m not asking Lance –“

“Because you’re afraid of what he’ll say, or because you’re afraid of what he won’t?” Lotor interrupts, and oh, okay, maybe Keith doesn’t even _need_ to discuss those reasons.

Lance is… he’s _good._ He’s the first really _good_ thing that’s crossed Keith’s path in a long damn time, and if Keith is honest with himself (which he almost never is), he’s almost willing to shoulder the moral fallout of letting Lance _stay good_ from his own perspective, even if the truth is something different. There’s the part of him that wants to stay far, far away from whatever’s made Lotor so vicious and Shay so protective, the part that will take the ignorance at face value because it’s easy and he just wants something to be _easy_ for once in his life. But then there’s the part that can’t do that, the part that’s still bruised from the last time he trusted something good to stay good, the part that wants knowledge if only to use it as a shield, given the fact that everything in his life has a habit of blowing up in his face and the smallest favor he could do himself would be to find a way to absorb some shrapnel and brace for impact. Those two factions of his mind war amongst themselves for a moment.

Letting the good stay good loses, as it usually does. It takes a strength to trust someone implicitly that Keith’s not sure he’s ever had.

“What do you mean?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

“I _mean,_ ” Lotor says, looking at him like a cat with a mouse between its paws, “I made this friendly visit to let you in on the fact that there’s plenty of shit about Lance that you don’t know. I’m not going to tell you, because I think you’re a big boy and should find out yourself – and because I want to kick back with a glass of crisp Pinot Grigio and watch Lance suffer, but that’s neither here nor there. That leaves you with three options, Kenneth.”

“Keith.”

“Karl.” He does that dismissive hand-wave again before holding up three fingers, putting one after the other back down with each bullet-point in the manifesto that follows. “Option one: you try to take the high road and vow to not go prodding into Lance’s personal life. This, of course, will eventually drive you crazy, leading you to either option two or option three. Option two: You ask Lance, and he tells you the truth, thereby ruining him for you forever, and you run away as fast as your mousy little legs can carry you. Option three: You ask Lance, and he tells you nothing, meaning _you,_ sweet cheeks, have to carry on with all of this knowing that your boy toy is a dirty rotten _liar_ among a whole host of other things you can only begin to guess at. And the best part?”

He smiles again, all straight white teeth with malice clenched behind them, and hums, self-satisfied, “No matter what page you pick in this little choose your own adventure novel, _I win._ ”

Maybe it’s that infuriating level of self-satisfaction that snaps Keith out of it. Or, more likely, maybe it’s the sudden self-awareness and outrage that whatever game Lotor’s playing, Keith’s less of a target and more of a pawn. He can handle other peoples’ bullshit, and he can handle being talked-down to, but he’s been through enough episodes in his life of being used that he’s developed a zero- _fucking_ -tolerance policy in that regard.

“Yeah, okay, Tech Week, you can take all the Disney villain bullshit and march it right out of my library,” he snaps, reshelving the last of the Shakespeare in a few sharp motions and not-so-gently using the book cart to herd Lotor out of the stacks.

“You can’t kick me out,” he pouts, somehow managing to produce a wallet from the pocket of those painted-on jeans and letting it drop open to reveal an Altea University card with his name and picture on it. “Got my student ID and everything.”

“If you’re not here to check out a book or study, I’m within my rights to boot your ass onto the quad for disturbing the quiet study area.”

“I’m here for… a Sondheim biography,” he counters, bullshit, _bullshit,_ grabbing the first book he sees off the end cap of a nearby shelf. He shoots Keith this smile, this you’ll-regret-this-when-I’m-eating-your-heart-with-a-nice-cabernet smile, and says, dripping with double-entendre, “Check me out?”

Keith grumbles and stalks to the front desk, because, asshole or not, he both sort of likes and really needs this job.

Lotor fucking _autographs_ the checkout slip after Keith stamps the date, taking up half the lines on one side. “I’ll be back. Wouldn’t want you to hit me with a late fee.”

Keith bites back a comment about how he’d rather hit him with something blunt and heavy, because again, job, thing he needs. Besides, he wouldn’t be the one painted favorably if he spoke his mind here and now. Lotor’s amicable as you please now that people are watching, all of that menace left floating back in the stacks somewhere, replaced by a sickly-sweet demeanor as he scoops up the Sondheim biography in his arms.

“Give Lance my regards, Klaus,” he calls over his shoulder, heading for the front door.

_“Keith.”_

“Later, Kurt!”

The door swings open with a burst of damp, icy air, and just like that, he’s gone. Keith takes a moment to try to wrap his head around what the hell just happened, but then Coran’s riding towards him on the back of a train of three more book carts that seem to be completely out of his control, and he decides that maybe it’s something best meditated upon later.

* * *

It’s the _worst_ kind of cold outside.

Being from Miami makes Lance more than used to humidity, but wet cold is about fifty times worse than wet heat, the gray slush covering the quad finding its way inevitably into his shoes and straight to the marrow of his bones until he feels achy and already sick from the pneumonia he’s bound to have in a few days. He’s starting to debate making for the safety of the Theta house, but knowing his luck he’d freeze to death halfway back and at least here on the steps of the library someone would find his body. There are very few things that would make this frigid hell worthwhile, including free food, Warped Tour tickets, and the person currently walking out the library’s front door.

“Hey, you,” he grins, trying to keep his teeth from chattering as he jogs over and falls into step beside Keith, who makes his way across the quad, eyes on his shoes.

It takes him a solid minute to respond with a halfhearted, “Hey.”

Lance blinks and then frowns, nudging his shoulder against Keith’s repeatedly until he makes this adorable, irritated little noise and whips around to look at him. “You seem kinda down. You okay?”

“Two consecutive all-nighters,” Keith answers, bleary-eyed and unfocused. “I can taste colors right now.”

“Yikes. Will you let me buy you a coffee?”

“I’ll _encourage_ you to buy me a coffee.”

The one bright side of going to college in the middle of nowhere is that it makes you appreciate the things in life that you normally take for granted – namely, Starbucks. The coffee shop in the student union isn’t even _technically_ a Starbucks, just an off-brand place that happens to serve Starbucks coffee, but a macchiato is a macchiato, especially when you’re thirty minutes from the nearest gas station and forty-five from anything else. Keith looks at the cup Lance hands to him like a man wandering the desert might look at an oasis, chugging half before any trace of coherency comes back to his eyes.

“You look like you’ve seen some shit, dude,” Lance laughs, pulling a Monster out of his backpack and cracking the can open as he folds himself into a chair across the table from Keith.

“You have no idea,” Keith says with an exhausted little laugh, raking a hand back through his hair and messing it up. It’s kind of unfair how someone can look so _pretty,_ even when rocking the under-eye bags, no-shower look. He reaches into his backpack to grab his laptop and a small stack of books, and something about that motion makes the ghost of a smile die on his face, his brow knitting up as he drums his fingers on the cover of _The Great Gatsby._ “So how’d your Shakespeare paper treat you?”

“With brutal, unnecessary cruelty,” groans Lance, leaning back in his chair and trying to forget the trauma (something to the tune of four in the morning, innumerable empty gas station energy shot bottles, and many, many tears of frustration only to get him a C-minus by the skin of his teeth).

“Unfortunate.” Keith’s got that distant, unfocused look again, but this time his lips are pressed into a thin line, fingers drumming faster and faster on the cover of the book. He keeps up the trance-like state for several minutes, like he’s retreated into his own head, like Lance isn’t even there anymore. When he finally snaps out of it, he just looks _tired,_ resigned and almost sad as he picks up his coffee and stares down at the lid. “Speaking of brutal, unnecessary cruelty, I had a talk with Lotor earlier.”

“Fuck.”

_Fuck._

It’s like the floor falls out from under him. It’s a hackneyed, clichéd thing to feel, but it’s literally like anything Lance had to stand on has been ripped away and he’s falling, falling, hitting every nasty memory and destroyed hope for a better tomorrow on the way down. He should’ve known that it would only be a matter of time, what with it being a small campus and word travelling fast, but knowing that Keith’s in all of his bullshit now – _Keith,_ who’s got that rare, pretty laugh and eyes softer than he probably wants them to be, who debates about Legend of Zelda timeline theories with him at lunch, who makes his heart do stupid squeeze-y somersaults in his chest even though Lance has been down this road enough times to know better – it’s like being punched in the stomach and body-slammed into a brick wall simultaneously. He forgets how to breathe, and Keith just sits there and watches him, his face a blank slate, which is somehow even scarier than the anger or disappointment that should be there.

Lance swallows hard and prepares for the worst. “What did he say to you?”

“What do you think he said?” Keith asks, his expression still horrifyingly unreadable.

“Look, Keith –”

“It’s an easy question.”

Lance’s voice sputters and dies in his throat, hands half-extended like they could wrap around the words floating somewhere up above his head and pull them to his aid. “I… He… If he said anything, you didn’t get the whole picture. It’s a long story that’s very hard to make short.”

Keith knocks the last of his espresso back like a shot of whiskey and meets his eyes for a long moment before he looks back at the cover of his book. “I’ve got time.”

“We used to date; it ended badly. End of story. Whatever he told you, it was either a lie or delusional.”

Keith makes a skeptical noise and leafs through the pages of his book. “How do you know that if you don’t know what he told me?”

“Because Lotor’s fucking _certifiable,_ okay?! He’s _nuts!_ ” Lance snaps, hating the crack of desperation in his voice that begs _believe me, believe me, believe me and leave it ALONE._ This slippery slope leads back to a place he doesn’t want to revisit, a place where he _definitely_ doesn’t want to bring Keith, and the fear of that place rises from his chest and into his throat and chokes him to the point that it takes half his energy drink to wash it down to the point where he can keep speaking. “We dated for a year, and our relationship ended with him taking a screwdriver and a baseball bat to my tires and windshield, respectively.”

Keith looks up from his book and blinks slowly, a real expression finally settling on his face. He looks taken-aback, and… remorseful? “Oh. I thought… Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah,” Lance grumbles, kicking dejectedly at a wadded-up napkin on the floor near his foot. “Any further questions?”

Keith’s cheeks go a shade pink that’s not from the cold outside, and he bites at his bottom lip for a second before answering with a tentative, “No, I just… That seems like a big deal. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s a part of my life and a part of myself that I’m trying really hard to leave behind.” That much of it can be real, unfiltered honesty. Lance can afford that much. Sighing, he polishes off the rest of his drink and crushes the can in his hand, letting the wreckage of it teeter and fall onto the table. “And it’s a shitshow, in terms of interpersonal drama. I didn’t want to drag you into it. It’s not something I’d willingly expose a friend to.”

“I’m not made of glass, Lance,” says Keith, scowling a little.

“Maybe some of us are, though.” Lance _feels_ made of glass, all fragile and tragically transparent as he sits there and tries to put Keith’s mind at ease, which is really damned hard considering that Lance feels like screaming. “Look, all this shit with Lotor… it’s a lot. And if I thought you needed to know the nitty-gritty, I’d tell you. But right now, all you need to know is not to listen to anything he tells you, okay? Just keep on keepin’ on. He was probably just trying to stir shit. If you didn’t feed into it, he’s not likely to bother you again.”

Neither of them say anything for a long time, the conversation fading into the crackle of the fireplace in the corner and the small talk of students sitting around them, gossiping and studying and living their lives. Keith looks at his book. Lance looks at Keith.

Finally, setting _The Great Gatsby_ aside _,_ Keith softly says, “You’re not the only one with ex-boyfriend baggage, y’know.”

There’s something so _raw_ on his face in that moment that it catches Lance off-guard, a look in his eyes that Lance recognizes too well as old hurt that never finished healing over. It’s not that pretty, poetic brokenness that you hear so much about in works of art – it’s real and ugly and looks like it’s tearing him apart at the seams for the split second it takes Keith to realize that he can see it and make himself impassive again. Like flipping a switch. It would be enviable if it weren’t so tragic.

“In this case, I kinda am,” says Lance, standing up and shouldering his backpack. “Look, I just need you to trust me, okay. Do you trust me?”

“Yeah,” Keith says, and smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Going ten rounds with a prizefighter would be preferable to this.

“I’ve gotta get to Astro.” A lie, but not the worst one he’s told today. Lance digs the last few crumpled dollar bills out of the pocket of his jeans and puts them down on top of Keith’s laptop before reaching over the table and giving his shoulder a parting squeeze. “Grab another coffee on me, and try to find some time to relax, okay?”

Keith watches him go, tired and sad and presumably to the planetarium, from the big bay window on the far wall of the coffee shop. For once in his life, Lance is glad for the snow, because it clouds visibility after several yards. Which means Keith can’t see him after he passes the big flagpole in the center of the quad. Which means that Keith still thinks he’s going, tired and sad, to the planetarium, when the reality is that he’s headed next door to the fine arts building, and he’s _pissed._

“I’m about to do something incredibly stupid,” he says into his phone as he heads down the steps into the amphitheater that makes up the front of the building, cursing as he slips on wayward patches of ice. “I don’t want you to stop me, but I want you to know that I’m doing it.”

 _“Should I even bother asking?”_ Hunk sighs on the other end of the line, the various whirs and bangs of the engineering lab in the background.

“I’m on my way to rip You-Know-Who a new asshole, so –”

 _“Lance,”_ Hunk groans. Lance can almost hear his palm colliding with his face. _“If I beg, will you refrain? Dude, I’ll never hear the end of it from Shay, think of my happiness, think of my future marriage –_ ”

“He decided to drag Keith into it.”

Hunk pauses. _“Oh, in that case, go. Kill.”_

“I intend to. Later, dude.”

 _“Try not to get arrested. Or worse, incur my girlfriend’s wrath.”_ Click.

The fine arts building is the newest structure on campus after the Planetarium, a massive construction that houses the music, theater, and visual arts programs all under one roof. It’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of hallways, but Lance has spent enough time in them to know how to navigate, not to mention that he knows exactly where he needs to go. It’s five o’clock on a Wednesday, and there’s music floating through the halls, this gorgeous, familiar tenor that twists in his chest like a knife and he is _not_ going to cry, dammit, no crying, he can smell weakness from a mile off –

Two meek little freshman crewmembers try and fail to stop him from barging into the auditorium, bleating about it being a closed rehearsal, but he shoves past them, stalking down the main aisle to the edge of the stage, where Lotor’s standing beside a piece of half-finished scenery in sweatpants and a _Wicked_ t-shirt cut off into a crop top, hair up in a messy silver knot at the top of his head. He’s practicing his Act One showstopper for this semester’s production of _Beauty and the Beast._ Lance remembers hearing him warming up for the audition in the shower, and stomps down on the ache that comes with the memory, waiting impatiently for his presence to be noticed.

“We need to talk,” he says as soon as the last notes of the song fade out.

Lotor looks positively _gleeful_ – of course he does; this was his plan from the beginning – dropping his script with an emphatic thud onto the set and planting a hand on his hip. “Barging into a closed rehearsal? And you said _I_ was the dramatic one.”

 _“Now,”_ Lance growls, about two seconds from crawling up onto the stage, dignity be damned.

Lotor makes a big deal out of rolling his eyes and sighing (of course he does, _of course he does_ ) before gesturing for Lance to meet him offstage and leaving his castmates with a contrived “Sorry, everyone. I’m needed,” like he didn’t calculate the timing of this shit right down to the minute.

They meet in an empty storage room off of stage left that smells of paint thinner and lumber. Lotor’s waiting on him with a bottle of some fancy designer electrolyte water in one hand and a flask in the other, fixing him with a look that’s half sadistically overjoyed and half disbelieving that Lance was actually stupid enough to walk right into this. “What can I do for you, Lance?”

“What the _fuck_ are you doing.”

“Well, I was trying to have a rehearsal, before someone interrupted it,” he says, all fake innocence and big amber eyes, tilting his head to the side.

Lance’s fists clench so hard at his sides that he can feel his knuckles crack. “Cut the _shit_ , Lotor.”

Lotor just laughs, taking his sweet time unscrewing the top of the flask and taking a long swig before he shrugs and says, “I just think that Oscar Milde deserves to know how deep the hole of shit he’s digging himself into really goes.”

There’s no _just_ about this because there’s never a _just_ with him; there’s always seventeen layers of bullshit and unnecessary dramatics and Lance has _had it up to here_ with feeling like his life is some sort of production, even without the factor of Keith being pulled into this disaster. Lotor does this _thing_ where he lets you think you’re out and then yanks you back in, gives you enough slack to choke yourself trying to run, and then does it again, and again, and again until you’re trapped in a cycle that drives you mad, and Lance was over it months ago, _over it_ doesn’t even touch how he feels now.

He lets out this strangled bark of an outraged noise, shaking his head and crossing the room in a few long strides until they’re toe-to-toe. “No, you do _not_ get to do this; you do _not_ get to _sabotage my life –_ ”

“Really, Lance?” asks Lotor, infuriating in how calm he is, taking another drink from the flask and holding it out to Lance in an offer he doesn’t accept. “ _That’s_ your choice of words in this? _I_ don’t get to sabotage _your life?_ Rich. That’s rich.”

“It’s _over,_ ” Lance says as bluntly as he possibly can, raking his hands back through his hair and scarcely believing that they’re still hashing this shit out months after the fact. “I have fixed my car. I am attempting to move on with my life. It’s over, and I’d appreciate it if you would just _let it be over_.”

“Oh, no. No no no. You do _not_ get off that easy,” Lotor says, reaching out and poking the tip of his nose with one bony finger. He starts out smiling, but the expression sours and warps further with every word until it’s an all-out _snarl,_ hatred incarnate. “You don’t get to just walk away and pretend nothing happened. And no one will _ever_ enter into any kind of relationship with you again without knowing _exactly_ what you are. As long as you and I are on the same campus, you can guaran- _goddamn_ -tee that.”

“I swear to God, Lotor, if you don’t leave this alone…” he starts, but trails off halfway because both of them know an empty threat when they see it.

“What, Lance? What are you going to do? I have all of the power here, and you know what else I’ve got? Nothing to lose. There is _nothing_ you can take from me that you haven’t already,” Lotor scoffs, trying to brush it off, but Lance knows him well enough to hear the hurt in it. Pain’s a weak emotion, though, and he doesn’t _do_ weakness, never has, so he takes that hurt and hones it down into a blade, carves his lips into a confident smile as he leans in until they’re only a breath apart from Lance’s. “So I’m not scared of you. But you should sure as _hell_ be scared of me.”

He is. He’s scared, guilty, and a little bit turned on, but he won’t give away the satisfaction of showing it, so he meets his gaze evenly and doesn’t back down despite feeling like he’s about to shit his pants. To his own credit, he does a decent enough job that Lotor actually backs down first, which is practically unheard-of.

“Anyway, I have a show to star in,” Lotor says, briskly snapping out of the moment and reaching up to give Lance a pat on the cheek that feels a bit like a slap before he turns around and sashays back towards the theater, not even sparing him a parting glance. “Good talk. Tell your boy I said hi. Or don’t. By the time I’m done, he’ll probably never trust anything you say ever again.”

Lance opens his mouth in an effort to try to get the last word in, but the door’s already swinging shut in his face, leaving him alone with the smell of paint thinner and lumber and vodka and Drakkar Noir.

He spends the rest of the evening hiding in the Planetarium, fluctuating between taking naps under the chairs or floating around the halls, dropping in on the few of his professors who are still in their offices to catch up on assignments. He hides in the bathroom while maintenance locks up and then sneaks back into the dome and turns on the projector, watches constellations and galaxies flicker across the ceiling and tries to find some comfort in it. It doesn’t work as well as he’d like it to. Lance doesn’t take a whole hell of a lot seriously, but sitting there staring up at the lecture program for next week about the mechanics of solar flares, all he can think about is how the worst parts of himself feel like they’re going to swallow him whole until there’s nothing good left, until he and everyone he cares about burn away to so much wasted cosmic energy.

And then he turns off the projector, because that shit’s too heavy for a Wednesday night and Hunk keeps texting him that the pledges ordered pizza for everyone.

The quad’s dark and windswept as he slogs his way through the cold towards the Theta house, save for one lone window – the first floor of the library, gleaming like a beacon through the snow. Frowning, Lance turns the opposite way from home and wanders toward it, tugging on the front door and finding it unlocked.

Keith is hunched in a distinctly gargoyle-like pose over his laptop at one of the big study tables, a pile of books and papers around him in a haphazard nest and an empty coffee mug a few inches from his hand. He looks even more exhausted than this morning, eyes glassy and the dark shadows beneath them starting to look like bruises. His hands jitter where he holds them poised over his keyboard.

“Going for all-nighter number three?” Lance asks, and Keith jerks so hard that half of his papers fly off the desk, whipping around in his chair.

It takes him a moment to process who Lance is, after which he blinks a few times and shrugs and mutters, “Maybe.”

“You should take better care of yourself,” says Lance, walking over and picking up the fallen papers. It’s all different drafts of the same essay, he thinks, but he’s too tired and frazzled to put any effort into reading it.

“Maybe.”

“Keith. Hey.” Stacking the papers on the table beside him, Lance pulls up a chair, hands drumming nervously on his lap. “I just… I wanted to apologize for earlier. This shit’s a sore spot for me, but I shouldn’t have gotten so intense about it with you. So like, if I stepped on any toes, or I made you uncomfortable…”

“It’s fine,” Keith says, staring intently at his laptop screen.

“I just thought, y’know, when you said the thing about me not being the only one with ex-boyfriend drama –”

“I said _it’s fine_.”

“You are so _guarded,_ has anyone ever told you that?” says Lance, thinking about the moment in the coffee shop where Keith had been damaged and _real_ for the blink of an eye. He wants to believe, maybe selfishly or maybe out of some misguided desire to help, that maybe he’s not a force of wholesale destruction. That maybe, if he could get a little closer look at that hurt, he could take some of it away. But that’s hard when Keith shuts down like this, and Lance wants… something. He’s not sure, but he _wants._ “Like… you’re an amazing person. You’re an _amazing_ person. But any time someone starts to get close, you throw up these walls, and I just…”

He wants something to build instead of someone to break.

“I want to _know you,_ Keith. I really, _really_ want to know you. Am I out of line for saying that?”

Slowly, Keith heaves out a heavy breath and shuts his laptop, looking over at Lance. “What happened with Lotor?”

His stomach churns. “I… I can’t tell you the whole story. Not now.”

“Knowing’s a two-way street, Lance.”

Lance knows that. He knows that in some of the most agonizing ways possible, because historically, knowing him means knowing some really ugly shit. Knowing him, _really_ knowing him usually drives people off, and the ones who don’t leave are either too broken themselves to realize they should go, or Hunk. That’s it. Those are the two categories.

And the real _bitch_ of it all, the thing that really catches right in the hollow of his chest and stings so badly he can barely breathe, is that he _wants_ Keith to know him. Just not the ugly parts. It stings even more when he realizes that if you take the ugly parts away, there’s really not that much left.

“I’m okay with starting small if you are,” he offers, because a compromise is better than nothing.

Keith mulls it over for a minute, and then nods. “Yeah, I can start small.”

“Okay. My favorite color’s blue, my favorite food is tacos from this food truck that drives around my neighborhood back home, and my favorite movie is _Spaceballs._ ”

Keith laughs, and it’s the real, rare, pretty one. This time, the smile reaches his eyes. “Red, Primanti Brothers’ boneless wings, _Dead Poets Society_.”

They stay like that for a while; going down a two-way street of favorite sports teams _(“Miami Dolphins.” “Football sucks, give me the Pirates or give me death.”),_ favorite TV shows as a kid _(“Teen Titans. The original one, not the shitty reboot.” “Oh my God, same.”)_ , and high school mascots _(“A gator. Super Floridian, right?” “I mean, Pidge and I were lions, which isn’t very Pennsylvanian at all.”)_ until campus security rolls up and boots them out of the library well past midnight.

Lance walks Keith back to his dorm through the snow, and for the first time in a long time, he feels like he might have the chance to hold on to something good without it burning away in his hands, even if the feeling only lasts for a moment.

* * *

“Hey, guys,” Pidge yawns, sitting up in bed with their hair sticking out at a million different angles when Keith keys into their room. Blinking sleepily, they look at the clock on their phone and then back to Keith and Lance, still not coherent enough to make fluent sentences. “You know it’s like… two in the morning, right?”

Lance laughs and gives Keith a little nudge over the threshold, scratching at the back of his head beneath the hood of his Beta Theta sweatshirt. “Found this one burning the midnight oil in the library. Make sure he gets some sleep tonight, yeah?”

“You say as though he listens to me.”

“Put on your Scary Face. Hunk says you’ve got one.”

“Hunk’s not wrong,” Pidge concedes, putting on their glasses and swinging their legs out of bed to stand up. “Thanks, Lance.”

Lance waves it off, jamming his hands into his hoodie pocket and answering with a lopsided smile. “No biggie. Have a good night, you two. Catch you later, Keith.”

“Yeah, g’night,” Keith says, waiting for the door to close behind him before he shrugs off his jacket and starts to climb up into his bunk.

“Are you still not ready to talk to me?” Pidge says flatly, clicking on their desk lamp and shrugging a fuzzy green robe on over their pajamas.

Keith groans and lets his head drop back onto the “Pidge, can it not wait until I’m conscious?”

“No, it can’t! Because when you’re conscious, you don’t _talk to me_.” They sound half-wounded, half-pissed, and even though Keith can’t see their face, he kind of wants to punch himself in his own. “You’re never here, you don’t sleep, you barely eat, you look like you’re half-dead all the fucking time… What is going _on_ with you, Keith?”

There’s a moment, a tenuous, weak moment where he almost caves in and tells them everything – dropping out of ROTC, the scholarship, the debt, feeling like he’s going a hundred miles an hour towards the edge of a cliff every waking moment of his life – but he stops himself at the last moment, biting down hard on the inside of his cheek until he tastes copper. “I’m a senior in college. This happens to everyone.”

Cursing under their breath, Pidge plants a foot on their mattress and hauls themself up with the sound of creaking wood and metal until the top of their head peeks over the side of Keith’s bunk, bespectacled and glaring. “So am I, and I don’t walk around looking like a zombie! I don’t shut my best friend out!”

“I’m not shutting you out –”

“No, you’re shutting _everyone_ out,” Pidge says over his protest, hopping back down to the floor when Keith props himself up on one elbow to look at them. “Me, Allura, Hunk… Hell, I bet you’re shutting Lance out, too. We’re _worried._ ”

“Well, don’t be. I’m handling it.”

“Handling _what?_ ”

_“Nothing!”_

Pidge lets out a strangled, frustrated scream that makes their suitemates next-door pound on the wall, flinging a pillow across the room and throwing their hands up in the air. “Fine! Keep this up, Keith. Shut me out and go to bed and stay on this death spiral with no help; see how it goes for you!”

And then they turn off the lamp and crawl back into bed, and that’s it.

Keith stays awake, staring at the ceiling for an indeterminate amount of time, trapped between fighting off the sensation of drowning that hits him whenever he’s in one place for too long and beating himself up for making Pidge – who’s probably the one person left in his life who actually _could_ help if he’d let them – feel like he’s pushing them away. It’s not a pleasant place to be, and it sits like an elephant on his chest until he heaves himself onto his side and looks out the window. The snow clouds are starting to clear, and the sky is a brilliant, diamond-studded black, moonlight dappling through the blinds and painting shadow-patterns across his skin. For some illogical reason, he thinks about Lance. For some even more illogical reason, he takes a full, even breath.

A while later, the bunk shudders again, and Pidge’s leg hikes up over the side followed by the rest of them, slithering up beside him on the narrow mattress. Their chin is bony and aches a little where they perch it on his shoulder. “You awake?”

“Yeah.”

Sighing, Pidge flings an arm over his waist and a leg across both of his, tiny but warm. “You’re an asshole.”

Still watching the stars coming through the clouds outside, Keith says, “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Pidge says, voice muffled in his shirt. “Just… try to be okay. You’re my person. I love you, and I want you to be okay. Okay?”

“Okay,” Keith says, without confessing that it’s been so long since he felt okay that he’s not sure if he remembers how to even try.

“And whatever this is, whatever you’re running from that’s so bad you feel like you can’t tell me, I’ll be here when you’re ready to stop running.”

“Thanks, Pidge,” he says, but they’re already falling asleep on his shoulder, breaths deep and even.

The stars keep shining outside, and the moonlight keeps painting shadows through the blinds, and for the first time in three days, Keith lets himself stop running long enough to sleep. In the grander scheme of things, that might not be much, but it’s the first step he can take towards trying to be okay. And for a little while, in the space between waking and dreams, he is.

He’s okay.


End file.
